tl;dr – It would be great to have someone(s) adopt James Kiesel’s Babble plugin. There are precedents for Discourse plugin adoptions (example) and I know too many people who use Babble don’t want to see it slowly deteriorate to the point where it becomes obsolete.
There’s been a trend over the past two or so years with fewer and fewer updates or bug fixes to Babble. There’s no judgment here – @gdpelican made it quite clear on the original Babble forum thread that he doesn’t have the incentive or desire to continue with Babble. I certainly respect that.
@angus and others have pitched in to fix bugs over the last year or so – which I’m grateful for – but how long can the seemingly random generosity of devs last?
I’m not sure what the process might be to have Babble get adopted by another developer or team of developers. @jomaxro, @simon, or @justin – I think one of you or another Discourse team member might be able to help us out here.
Although I can’t find it anymore, I do believe there was once a discussion about incorporating Babble into Discourse core and the decision was made not to do that. Assuming there’s no chance Babble will become part of Discourse core and therefore officially supported, I don’t see a good path to being able to continue using a functional Babble without someone taking primary responsibility for it.
If money is an issue, I’m happy to seed the pot if necessary on behalf of my Babble-using forum.
I don’t think band-aids and slow, reactive bug fixes are going to cut it much longer with Babble. Can we save it before it becomes unusable?
P.S. I know all about Discourse’s integrations with things like Slack for a chat-like experience within Discourse. I like Babble and don’t want to integrate with a third-party tool for the casual chat experience.