[TriLUG] IRC

Cristóbal Palmer cristobalpalmer at gmail.com
Tue Oct 23 10:04:24 EDT 2012


On Monday, October 22, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Michael Hrivnak wrote:
> What is this nonsense happening on #trilug today? […] Does TriLUG actually have control of this channel?

Yesterday was an unusually full day; apologies for not responding sooner.

In the future, if people have problems with the IRC channel, I suggest they avail themselves of ChanServ to see who all has access for #trilug and then directly try talking to those people. If you're connected to freenode, then you can do that with most clients by first starting a query with ChanServ:

  /query ChanServ

And then asking ChanServ for a list of nicks with access:

  ACCESS #trilug LIST

I am one of those people on the list, and since another member of the SC requested I take action, I did so:

  18:21:10 -!- mode/#trilug [+o COXN] by ChanServ
  18:21:10 -!- CAPSLOCKBOT was kicked from #trilug by COXN [CAPSLOCKBOT]
  18:21:34 <@COXN> capslockday is over a bit early

I would gently suggest that if you are finding IRC (or any particular communications channel) incredibly annoying, you should take a step back and look for another communications channel. The IRC channel is a semi-official home-away-from-home for us, and even though I have some administrative privileges there by virtue of having been on the SC for a few years and having asked for those privileges, none of us (TriLUG SC members) own that space in any meaningful way. This list has 600+ subscribers and is something that is actively owned/maintained by the LUG, while the IRC channel rarely has more than 70 nicks. What I'm saying is that while I and others do our best to volunteer our time an energy to maintain Linux-friendly communications services for y'all, it's bit odd and frustrating to see a thread like this on our main list.

Given that several people spoke up in strong terms on this list, however, I sought to gauge my own reaction by pinging other people and by looking through logs for some objective answers. Others on the Steering Committee have agreed with me that taking a very hands-on role in policing the IRC channel could cause other problems, and so responding when there seems to be a problem (as I did yesterday) is both acceptable and appropriate. Again, I'm sorry my response wasn't more timely. After looking through logs, I came to the conclusion that this has happened twice in the past two years. Both were this year. Each time the activity spanned the midnight day boundary for my logs:

~/irclogs
$ find . -path "./201*trilug.*log" | xargs grep -l "CAPSLOCKBOT" | xargs egrep -l "was kicked from.*(LOWERCASE NICK|NOT FOR PLEASURE)"
./2012/freenode/#trilug.06-28.log
./2012/freenode/#trilug.10-21.log
./2012/freenode/#trilug.06-27.log
./2012/freenode/#trilug.10-22.log



I've reviewed the access list, and I believe the bot doing this (CAPSLOCKBOT) will not be able to do this again. If I'm wrong, I'll ping freenode staff and see if I can be made a founder so that I can prune our access list after a more thorough investigation.

Cheers,
--  
Cristóbal Palmer

cmpalmer.org  

P.S. 22 October does seem to be CAPSLOCKDAY and 28 June seems to be the anniversary of Billy Mays' death. Maybe that helps some people contextualize this and respond differently. My role is -- again -- to be a good steward of Linux-friendly spaces. Please help me fulfill that role by bringing your IRC issues to the people who can do something about it off-list.



More information about the TriLUG mailing list