Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is useless, often returning no results when you can spend an hour scrolling to find what you want manually.
This is inexcusable when Gitter is your project's de facto Q&A place instead of more structured places like StackOverflow or Github issues.
And so the users are left with a messy stream of collective consciousness that is impossible no search or navigate effectively.
Speaking as a library maintainer, I've got GitHub issue that stayed there for months before I replied. That's because my time as a contributor is very limited and I get fatigue when replying to too many support tickets.
And you'd think, oh wait but there are other people willing to reply. But not really. Forum, email groups, even StackOverflow only work when the projects you're talking about are insanely popular.
This is because of two reasons:
1. people with problems are bad at describing those problems — this is why StackOverflow answers often don't answer the freaking question, but rather try to guess what the author wanted, a trend that's driving me insane, because I often want the answer to the question being asked and not something else; whereas on a chat channel, people have conversations, which helps clarify the intent
2. people are afraid of being wrong; but chat is more casual, so in my experience more people end up participating
Chat has other benefits. You can have off topic conversations, you can make jokes, you can make friends. I do wish Gitter had threaded conversations. They promised it at some point but nothing came of it.
Also, I do like Discourse (https://discourse.org). It does a good job to mix some chat features with forums. Scala has Discourse forums, like for example https://users.scala-lang.org ... but the Scala Gitter channel is way more popular.
And one final thought: I know communities that have virtually no meaningful online presence. You might be annoyed at our choice for using Gitter, but at least you've got some chat channels to go to.
I've never had much satisfactory help from chat. I think I've never quite understood the social element of it. Do I wait for a pause? Do I make friends first? Just ask my question and wait?
Ask a question and hang around for half hour to see if anyone replies?
And in the meanwhile 6 different conversations, statements, off-topic chats and other noise is scrolling past me completely ruining any focus I had.
I find them utterly hateful things when I'm in problem-solving mode. Maybe they are more fun when you're in a "sort of working" mode but that's not when I need help.
Our experiences are wildly different.
On Gitter, on the channels I hang out, I think I got answers to my problems in 99% of cases.
Without the AI tier though scaling this is near impossible as you tend to a "most recent loudest" priority system, certainly if your support case to support rep ratio isn't balanced. Users also have to resort to repeating requests in a chat-only forgetful system.
This is why I ended up investigating hybrid sync/async interaction systems that cater better for not forgetting threads.
Search definitely needs improvement and is on the roadmap. You can track these issues,
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387
You can track https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/irc-bridge/issues/52 for seeing more users in the member list/roster. There is a proposal there to trickle in new users to the list every time a new message comes through the bridge with relevant code linked (merge request welcome).
that said, gitter has many useful features that aren't available on irc: inline code with syntax highlighting, inline images, etc.
If you want to stop email notifications, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/doc...
You could also adjust your notification settings to "Mute", https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/doc...
But the real problem is that unread item count is coupled to the emails being sent out, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1205. So if you have notifications set to "All" or "Announcements" which track unreads, you will get emails for any unread messages in the room which isn't desirable.
However I wish they'd fix their IRC bridge, which has some issues, like not reporting the full list of users, which is driving me insane.
Speaking of Slack-like, the best alternative remains in my opinion good old IRC. I'm a user of https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.