IRC Issues [From Stepping Down]

[Jan Claeys]

Op maandag 05-10-2009 om 10:38 uur [tijdzone +0300], schreef Miia Ranta:
> {this email in short: we need human interaction with human enforced,
> case-to-case based problem solving with rules that can live through
> change and work for people with different background}
> 
> in all the years I've IRC'd, I've noticed a pattern in how IRC
> channels are operated and perhaps more importantly, why they are
> operated like they are. Let me explain.
> 
> While there are few obvious very precise rules that the breach of them
> usually deserve a kick or even a ban, such as "no flooding", "no spam
> links", "no unauthorised bots" and so on, some things are best left as
> blanket rules such as "no excessive swearing" without going into
> details what is swearing and what limits there are to it, or "no
> system info, uptime or other useless scripts" without going into
> details which scripts are allowed, "no shock pages" without going into
> details which of them are forbidden, etc.
> 
> This is, when asked, usually for couple of reasons:
> 1) World evolves: There's no way of listing all curse words, shock
> sites, scripts, discussion topics in a way that could be presented as
> the rule of Gods of IRC. While most of them might be known, there is
> always something new.
> 
> 2) We are dealing with people as people: in #ubuntu and #kubuntu there
> are the floodbots that combat the most common way of a bot attack. The
> rest is left for people to handle, as the probability of false
> positive decisions made by bots increases as we move to dealing with
> people, who - as we know - are often irrational bunch and don't act in
> patterns that could be detected by bots to a degree of certainty we
> can live with.
> 
> 3) Strict rules allow loopholes: strict rules of what is allowed and
> what is not, people find loopholes which they use to circumvent the
> spirit of the rules.
> 
> As for Ubuntu IRC channels, this is my personal observation and
> thoughts:
> The kicks, bans and notices given by people to people are probably the
> best way of handling this, as they need to be explained to receiver by
> people who have issued them, and no bot can do this in a way that
> would be on a level we (as the IRC op team, or I personally) can
> approve. Ubuntu is "Linux for human beings" and governing the IRC, a
> method of human communication, is something we can not delegate to a
> overgrown piece of Python or TCL. We're dealing with people from
> different cultures and backgrounds (as Paul said earlier) and need to
> keep the human contact to things. 

Sorry, I couldn't snip in this, as it's (almost) exactly as how I tend
to work as an operator.  :)

So +1 on this.


-- 
Jan Claeys