Questions: GitHub Discussions & How to forward portal room to native room

[Mikaela]

• Easier question first: could GitHub Discussions be enabled for this repository for an easier and less realtime forum outside of opening issues that aren't really issues?
  • https://docs.github.com/en/discussions
• How can I force people who attempt to join a portal room to join another room instead?

On the second question, I have two actual scenarios and one theoretical one:

• A channel started using Matrix before the freenode -> Libera.Chat migration happened and was given PL100 in the portal room which was later tombstoned into a native room using Matterbridge. Later we moved to Libera.Chat while having active users on Matrix, but would like to point the portal room to the Matrix room that is untouched by appservices. This would also allow us to get Matrix users through +r and have prettier messages than attempting to ban Matrix users (which is also undocumented, how to do that?)
• An organisation had 6 rooms at Matrix that were previously bridged to freenode and later migrated to Libera.Chat. Now there are 12 rooms as the portal rooms are counted separately and any potential spam or accidental paste should also be removed from the portal rooms. How could the portal rooms be pointed into the plumbed room which people are actually using?
• Hypothetical scenario: a room is using Heisenbridge in relaybot mode with all Matrix users seeing IRC users natively and IRC users seeing a relaybot instead of a mass of ghosts using connection slots and in cases of issues performing mass join/quitting. How can the portal room be directed to the Heisenbridged room instead?
  • actually there is one organisation that would be hitting this if !channels were supported by matrix-appservice-irc (I cannot find the issue about that), but I am not personally involved in any responsibility with that one.

[Half-Shot]

How can I force people who attempt to join a portal room to join another room instead

I suspect on a technical level, we would probably just suggest that the portal room be closed and the alias moved. We've not yet found a great way to reconcile this automatically, and the work is pretty much done on what time we have as bridge admins. The process of doing so automatically would need to be safeguarded to avoid takeover style attacks, so it's a bit difficult.

[Half-Shot]

Easier question first: could GitHub Discussions be enabled for this repository for an easier and less realtime forum outside of opening issues that aren't really issues?

Tricky one. As an org, we've not decided on using them wholesale yet. While I'm happy for us to have places to help users, I'm a bit worried that more venues are going to strain our small team even more. Issues are generally fine for both bugs and feature requests, questions should be answered by folks in the public rooms (and I'm not against questions in this repo if no answer appears).