Replicant

h1. CommunityAndContact

The Replicant community has several places where people interact together.

h2. Mailing list

Most Replicant developers are on the mailing list, as it is also used to review patches. Many non-developers that are contributors or that don't contribute to Replicant are also on the mailing list.

It's being used for many things:

* Ask questions about Replicant, discuss about issues, etc.

* Discuss about Replicant in general.

* Discuss about Replicant contributions and development

* Review patches

The volume is moderate but there are sometimes spikes due to the to a huge patch set being sent.

To register you can use the "Mailman interface":https://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant . That interface also has a non-searchable archive of the list.

Alternatively, there is also a "searchable archive":https://www.mail-archive.com/replicant@osuosl.org of this list.

h2. Forums

The "Replicant forums":https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/boards are used for similar things than the mailing list, however:

* Patches are not reviewed on the forums

* Less developers tend to be active on the forums

h2. IRC

Most Replicant developers and contributors, as well as many people who are interested our project, are present on the Replicant IRC Channel(s).

People from other communities are also there as we collaborate on various things, like adding support for devices in Upstream Linux.

In practice Replicant has three IRC channels, but it looks like there is only one since they are all bridged together. Bridged means that a user can join only one of the channels and send and receive messages with users on all the other channels because all messages are forwarded across every channel.

Our three IRC Channels are:

* #replicant on "Freenode":https://freenode.net/

* #replicant on "OFTC":https://oftc.net/

* #replicant on "hackint":https://hackint.org

We first created an IRC channel on Freenode, but since Freenode users have to register from a non-Tor IP address when first setting up an account, it didn't meet all of our users' anonymity needs.

Next we created an IRC channel on OFTC because it "does not require users to first connect in the clear and register with services to allow connecting via Tor" as they state "here":https://www.oftc.net/Tor/.

Most recently, we created an IRC channel on HackInt because it additionally provides the anonymity features of allowing anonymous connections via "Tor onion services":https://support.torproject.org/onionservices/ and allowing users to register via "Hashcash":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash instead of "CAPTCHA":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA as is explained "here":https://hackint.org/transport/tor/.

h2. Matrix

There is a matrix channel which is bridged to our two IRC channels. It is accessible at "#freenode_#replicant:matrix.org":https://app.element.io/#/room/#freenode_#replicant:matrix.org

h2. XMPP

There is an XMPP MUC which is bridged to our two IRC channels. It is accessible at "#replicant%irc.freenode.net@irc.disroot.org":https://nl.movim.eu/?chat/%23replicant%25irc.freenode.net%40irc.disroot.org/room

h2. Private contact address

We also have a private contact address for the project, for inquiries that are private / confidential. 

Very few people receive that list, and the ones that do tend to be very busy. So if your question can be answered on the "mailing list":https://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant, please use the mailing list. Unless you are writing about an explicitly private matter, we will likely advise you to write to the mailing list as we want to respond publicly when answering inquires as often as possible. We also won't forward your mail to the mailing list ourselves as otherwise we could mistakenly publish information that you wanted to keep private. See the [[PrivateContact]] page for use case and on how to use such contact address.

If you didn't manage to register to the mailing list, or if it doesn't work for you for some reasons, it's still possible to send a mail to the mailing list address without being registered. In that case we will be notified about it and we will be able to make it go through by manually going to the mailing list interface.