--- summary: Better support for discovering public rooms --- created: 2015-01-05 18:14:49.0 creator: matthew description: |- Big discussion on #matrix-dev just now about how better to support public room discovery. Options presented boiled down to: 1) ditch room directories entirely 2) directories show local rooms only (as is) 3) submit the /rooms/list URLs to Google and pray 4) run our own spider (how would it discover servers?) 5) run our own 'tracker' directory servers that HSes chose to advertise to (or can act as spiders themselves) 6) HS API let users query room lists from named servers (so both local and specific remote servers) 7) Let users advertise their own rooms on whatever directories they desire. Suggestion is to shift to option #6 for now. In future, we could do a combo of #4 and #5 (e.g. a dir.matrix.org service), to which HSes have the option of advertising themselves. The dir spider AS then connects via a trivial anonymous AS API-style subscription to the list of all public room events, and sits there spidering what's going on and showing an up-to-date view of the world. And there's nothing stopping users doing #7 entirely out-of-band. Or #3. id: '10889' key: SPEC-83 number: '83' priority: '2' project: '10001' reporter: matthew resolution: '1' resolutiondate: 2015-01-21 11:19:00.0 status: '5' type: '2' updated: 2015-01-21 11:19:00.0 votes: '0' watches: '2' workflowId: '10989' --- actions: - author: kegan body: 'Landed on matrix-doc/master : {{drafts/general_api.rst}}' created: 2015-01-21 11:19:00.0 id: '11156' issue: '10889' type: comment updateauthor: kegan updated: 2015-01-21 11:19:00.0