Move the IRC Bot extension to the Attic and prevent its installation from the Extension Manager

Development
1

Hi devs,

I’d like us to retire the IRC Bot Application (xwiki-contrib/application-ircbot).

Why

  • We no longer use IRC as a community: our chat is on Matrix now.
  • It’s unmaintained: the last release is 8.2.2 (May 2017) and the last commit is from 2019. It still builds against XWiki 8.2.x and its functional tests need Selenium 2 / Firefox 32.
  • We no longer run it anywhere ourselves (see below), so nobody is testing it on recent XWiki versions.

What I’ve already done on xwiki.org

  • Uninstalled the extension from dev.xwiki.org.
  • Kept the IRC logs: the archive pages (~2,900) and the IRC page with its livetable, plus the class, sheet and translations they need.
  • Cleaned up leftovers: an obsolete IRC.IRCArchiveClass / IRC.IRCArchiveClassSheet pair from 2008 (from the logging system that predates the bot, no longer used by any page), the dead bot-control block on IRC.WebHome, and the bot’s IRC.IRCConfiguration page on the main wiki.

What we vote on

  1. Move xwiki-contrib/application-ircbot to the XWiki Attic, retire the IRCBOT JIRA project, and add a warning plus a Compatibility note on the extensions.xwiki.org page saying it’s no longer supported.
  2. Prevent the extension from being installed from the Extension Manager, by removing its extension id from its extensions.xwiki.org page (unless there’s now a better way to do this that I don’t know).

The vote is open for 72 hours, until Friday 23 October 2026.

Here’s my +1

Thanks

2

+1 thanks

3

+1 thanks

4

+1

Not yet. We need to conclude Strategy for Handling Deprecated Extensions on EXO which might provide it depending on the conclusion.

5

+1, thank you!

6

+1

Thanks,
Marius