Mumble/Murmur server

[u/sekh60]

So I've had the idea for a few months now of hosting a Murmur server. For those not familiar with it, it's a voice chat server like ventrillo or teamspeak, the client of which is called Mumble. I was thinking we could do regular group chats, kinda like our weekly check-in threads. It's voice only, no video.

We'd come up together as a subreddit ways to minimize trolling and that. At this stage I'm wondering if people would be interested in this. I'll make threads later on to discuss rules and registration procedures and that.

Post edit stuff below

The Software

So, let me elaborate a bit on Mumble/Murmur. The software is primarily a voice chat system, often used in gaming. It's pretty popular amongst Eve Online players. It's completely free (it's open source as well), and fully encrypted. It tends to have better sound quality than alternatives like Teamspeak or Ventrillo due to having very good noise cancellation. It works on Linux/Mac OSX, and Windows.

There is a chat window in Mumble, so users can type if they do not wish to use voice to speak. There is no built in speech-to-text though. So if we have any hearing-impaired users we'll have to work out a transcription system. In the Eve alliance I am in we generally have a volunteer that transcribes important information into text.

There's a fine grained permission system in Mumble. One can set users able to talk or not, able to chat or not, give various administrative permissions, etc. One can enable people to make their own temporary channels, so if someone wants to have a sub conversation with people, they can make a temp room to chat in.

There is a bit of a learning curve administrating Mumble/Murmur, using it is pretty easy for the most part, there's a setup wizard that guides through audio set up pretty well.

The Motivation We have weekly check-in threads, which people seem to really like and make good use of. We're going to keep having those. That said, I think a lot of people could benefit from more live discussion. I see these talks as being structured like my local peer support group's talks, with a few modifications. We'd have later discussions on structure since right now we're just talking about the idea of having Mumble/Murmur at all.

So what I'm thinking is we'd run the start of sessions like this: we'd start off with a simple welcome by the host, saying hello and introducing themself. After that we'd go around the channel, with each user, if they wish to (say pass if you want to pass) introducing themself (naturally no real names needed) and saying how they are doing and what's going on (pretty much a check-in). After we go around we'll have some time for open discussion. Then we'd ideally close with a guided meditation or visualization for a nice, calming close.

[u/sekh60 → u/[deleted]]

Sorry, potential wall of text, I think I'm a bit hypo-manic this morning due to lack of sleep.

So, mumble/murmur has text as well, which is nice. One can just listen in and chat use text to respond/contribute. There is no voice to text option in it though, so any hearing impaired users would have issue with that. To accommodate them we could have a volunteer during chats type what is said if someone requests it. This works well in Eve Online (an MMORPG) where in fleets there is often someone transcribing things for hearing impaired players.

It's be a while since I've heavily IRC'ed. To my recollection IRC lacks fine grained permissions. Can one make a channel private in IRC? I know one can set a channel to "voiced", so only approved users can talk, but people may not like anyone being able to walk in and listen in. Correct me if I'm wrong about being able to have private channels or not, again, it's been a while.

I'll add some more details about Murmur/Mumble in the post text to expand a bit on it.

[u/sekh60 → u/[deleted]]

That's a good point about some having people around they don't want to hear things. Maybe a two pronged approach would be better, like having an IRC channel and having a voice chat service, but having gathers at different times since typing and talking at the same time can be hard, at least for me. What server are your channels on?

[u/schizodepressive]

This sounds good to me though I too would prefer a text chat. I've always wanted to find a support group for people like me and this seems like the closest I could get. My only hang up would be that I'm not super tech-savvy. Whatever way we decide to do this I hope someone provides some directions for web-dummies like me.

[u/sekh60 → u/schizodepressive]

Thanks for the input. The way it's looking right now is maybe trying both an IRC channel (which is text only) and having the Mumble server for voice and talk for those who don't want to use voice.