I like to keep track of all things: shopping list, payments, projects, appointments and so on. In doing so I know when I'm way behind as there is a pile of items in "pending".
So I use Trello (most tasks, projects) integrated with Calendar (appointments, due dates) and Google Sheets (all payments, due dates).
That doesn't sound like a Gitter issue but a lack of activity in that particular project/community.
Some projects prefer email/github issues over chat as there isn't an active community around it 24/7 for anyone to just jump in and ask away.
I maintain an open source project where we have set up Gitter awhile ago. So far -even with a really small community like ours- I'm answering questions and interacting with users regularly.
I was wondering a similar implementation. I encrypt/decrypt database IDs to opaque them on the API. For primary entities but not enums/etc.
I separated API vs Core/Database so I wasn't too fond of adapting the entities to add a sort-of public id column so I create it at run-time.