JonKazama-Hellion
9a8a014795
Chat 2 has entered a major rework that Infi confirmed makes selective patches no longer portable. The cherry-pick pipeline as a routine workflow stops with the v1.4.x cycle. Documentation reflects the new state across all touchpoints. UPSTREAM_SYNC.md rewritten: replaces the "How I Cherry-Pick" / "Reviewing What Is New Upstream" / "Conflict Handling" sections with "Why Cherry-Picking Stopped", "What Closing the Pipeline Means in Practice", "What Does Not Change", "What Could Re-Open Later". Existing cherry-pick trails in the git history stay intact, EUPL-1.2 anchor lines and NOTICE.md remain canonical. README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, ROADMAP.md, THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and the PR template updated to match: cherry-pick references reframed as historical or pointed at UPSTREAM_SYNC.md for the current state. NOTICE.md keeps the BetterTTV cherry-pick example as a concrete past case but adds a paragraph that the pipeline is closed and clarifies the attribution standard is preserved unchanged. PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md drops the "Upstream cherry-pick from Chat 2" checkbox and the cherry-pick-path compatibility prompt. The upstream git remote was already removed locally on 2026-05-08 (separate change, not in this commit). No source-file edits, no manifest version bump, no changelog entry — this is documentation-only and ships with the next release.
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Notice
Acknowledgements
HellionChat is a fork of Chat 2 by Infiziert90 (Infi) and Anna Clemens, both of whom kept that plugin running and maintained for years before I ever opened the source. Without their work this fork would not exist, full stop. I owe them the architecture, the message store, the channel filtering, the sidebar tab system, the hooks into FFXIV's chat, the localisation infrastructure, and countless small decisions that I only noticed because they had already been made correctly.
If you find HellionChat useful, please remember that the foundation came from Chat 2. The code Anna and Infi wrote is doing most of the heavy lifting in this fork too.
A direct word to Infi and Anna
Hi. I am Florian (Flo, also Jon Kazama in-game on Phoenix). I forked Chat 2 because I wanted a privacy-by-default version for my own use case and a small group of friends I play with, not because I thought I could do anything better than what you built. The opposite is true. ChatTwo's default of full history and cross-character logging is the right call for most users. I just have a different threat model and a different data-handling philosophy that fits a smaller, locally-stored, retention- limited approach.
What HellionChat adds is mostly Hellion-specific surface area: a privacy filter, per-channel retention windows, an export pipeline, an Auto-Tell- Tabs feature for FFXIV club greeters, the Hellion theme and font, German localisation, and a settings UX rebuild. None of it touches the bones of what you built. Where I had to modify your code I tried to keep the edits minimal, isolated to clearly-marked Hellion files, and reversible.
Concrete example: when API 15 hit, I cherry-picked your fix for the
BetterTTV emote regression with git cherry-pick -x so authorship and
co-author trail stay intact. That was the standard I held to as long
as cherry-picking was viable, and you should never have to look at
this fork and wonder if I quietly ate your work.
With ChatTwo entering its rework cycle, the active cherry-pick
pipeline is closed since v1.4.x — see docs/UPSTREAM_SYNC.md
for the full reasoning. The attribution standard stays exactly the
same: every existing (cherry picked from commit ...) line remains
in the git history, the EUPL-1.2 anchor lines in source files are
untouched, and this NOTICE.md remains canonical. If anything from
this point forward originates from Chat 2 it will be a hand-port at
most, called out as such in the commit message and source comments,
not a git cherry-pick.
If anything in this fork ever steps on something you would not be okay with, please reach out and I will fix it. Genuinely. The list of contacts is below.
Maintainer contact
If something in HellionChat causes problems, especially if it relates back to Chat 2 or to anything Infi or Anna would want flagged:
- GitHub Issues: JonKazama-Hellion/HellionChat/issues
- Discord:
@j.j_kazama - Email (business): kontakt@hellion-media.de
I respond on weekdays during European business hours. For anything urgent (security, attribution, takedown), email is the fastest path.
Why this fork is not upstreamed
The privacy-by-default position fits a small audience. ChatTwo's full-history-by-default position fits a much larger one, including the roleplaying community where chat archive is part of the play experience. Trying to upstream HellionChat's defaults would have meant arguing that Chat 2's defaults are wrong, and they are not. They are right for the user base ChatTwo serves. So I keep the fork separate and attribute clearly. Active cherry-picking from upstream stopped in the v1.4.x cycle once Chat 2's rework made selective patches no longer portable; the existing cherry-pick trail stays in the git history.
Why HellionChat left the GitHub fork network
The Dalamud plugin ecosystem treats the GitHub-Fork relation as a signal that a fork is either a development branch or a dead mirror. HellionChat is neither. It is an independently-maintained EUPL-1.2 fork with its own release cadence, its own custom repo, its own user base. Detaching the fork-network relation just makes the situation honest. The git history, the existing cherry-pick trail, and the attribution stay exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the GitHub UI no longer says "forked from".
Trademarks and naming
"Chat 2" and "ChatTwo" are the names Infi and Anna chose for the upstream plugin. HellionChat does not use either of those names in user-facing copy except where required to describe origin (settings tab, manifest, this file, the README). The Hellion brand is mine.
Questions
This file is the canonical place for "is this attribution correct, is the maintainer reachable, is the relationship to Chat 2 documented". If anything in here is wrong, please open an issue or contact me directly.
Maintained under Hellion Forge, the modding and plugin line of Hellion Online Media | Bad Harzburg | hellion-media.de