Talk to us! – The Bro team’s communication channels

Bro is now more than 20 years old. The community has grown in size and diversity. In response we made some changes to the ways the Bro community can communicate with us.

Gitter

We are currently testing Gitter, a chat system designed for developers. Please join the Bro channel. You can browse to it at gitter.im/bro/bro, download the native apps, or connect via IRC. Currently, we have a Bro room and Broker room. We’re looking forward to seeing you there! The test will go on for a couple more weeks. Please give feedback in Gitter or to info@bro.org about this.

IRC

Our IRC channel #bro on Freenode is the well established chat where many people of the community as well as some Bro developers will answer questions.

The Bro Mailing Lists

We also will continue to maintain our mailing lists. The most important ones are bro@bro.org, bro-announce@bro.org, and bro-dev@bro.org.

bro@bro.org is our general user mailing list. If you prefer mail over chat, this should be your first address whenever you get stuck using Bro or want to understand something. Experienced Bro users and members of Bro’s developer team answer on this list.

bro-announce@bro.org is a low traffic mailing list used to announce Bro events, code releases, and other important news.

bro-dev@bro.org is the mailing list you should subscribe to if you want to follow or participate in discussions on Bro’s future from a developer perspective. On this list we discuss design and feature decisions, and also how to resolve problems and bugs. We recently moved automated mails from our ticket system away from this list to reduce the noise. The immediate effect was an increase in productive discussions.

Twitter

Our Twitter channel is @Bro_IDS. This is our channel for quick and short news, too small for bro-announce or a blog post.

Bro Community and other ways to reach us

More options to listen or talk to us are listed on our Community page.
If you need to talk to us in private about logistics, donation offers, or other special requests, you can write to info@bro.org.

A little reminder and request to the community: As an open source project the Bro team tries to help wherever possible with using and developing Bro. Please send technical questions to one of the mailing lists, though; not to info@bro.org. That way the broader Bro community gets a chance to chime in as well, and everybody will benefit from any responses.

The Bro User Community

We want to take this opportunity to thank all our users and contributors! Please keep talking to us.