Ubuntu Core Channels Blocking Shell Accounts. Discussion.

[Matt Darcy]

Hi all,

after failing to attend the last Ubuntu IRC Council meeting, for which
I'd actually raised an agenda item, it was suggested that I open this up
for discussion on the mail list, so here we go.


I'd like to propose a blanket ban on all unmanaged, or managed shell
servers that do not fit in with an agreed managment policy for the
ubuntu core channels.

First the background. In the last few months we had the re-occurence of
a couple of long term petty issue users in #ubuntu. A quick removal/ban
later, and they where back in multiple channels
#kubuntu/#xubuntu/#ubuntu-server etc etc doing the same thing. Quick ban
later and they are gone, until they started using shell servers such as
Shellium and bshellz (along with a few petty incidents of new user abuse).

To counter this I put a blanket ban on Shellium and bshellz on the core
channels. After some discussions with the Shellium admin team (who where
very helpful) we found out that the Shellium admin's don't like abuse of
their resources and promised to resolve any issues with abuse on their
hosts. With that in mind, I removed the blanket ban on Shellium users.
The same cannot be said for the bshellz admin team, who where not
actually bothered about abuse on their services, or policing them. They
where not being negative in any way, that just isn't their policy to
manage the shell users, and they don't want to police the servers to
stop trouble users from opening up multiple/repeat accounts, which is
there call.

We currently block tor, and have an excellent system in place for
Freenode web chat, which covers a big chunk of potential abuse services,
we also have blanket bans on some known abuse hosts, such as serverloft,
which seems to work well.

My proposal is

a.) come up with an agreed set of requirements for server shell hosts to
have to be allowed to use the ubuntu core channels, eg: the ability and
desire for them to block users from their service, the ability/desire to
administrate their service and a desire to work with external resources,
such as the Ubuntu irc team to resolve any issues.

b.) Any who don't fall within a.) AND have shown to be a source of abuse
(such as bshellz) get a blanket ban on the core channels.

Lets begin the discussion.

Matt