eir coming to #ubuntu

[Terence Simpson]

Hello everyone,
As most of you have probably heard by now, the IRC Council has been
planning to add the freenode utility bot “eir” to #ubuntu. We have
been working on adding some integration for eir into ubottu and we
feel that this is now in a usable state.

I’d like to address one concern that seems to have come up though. It
seems to have gotten into peoples heads that eir is somehow going to
replace the current ban-tracker we use with ubottu. This isn’t the
case though, eir is simply an addition to the tools available to the
operators in #ubuntu. The work that has gone into integration with
ubottu is just so that comments issued to the eir bot will
automatically get added to the ban-tracker via ubottu. The ban-tracker
is still the main informational tool for operators. The use of eir is
just another option available, it’s use is not required to continue
managing #ubuntu, though we do encourage everyone to try eir out.

There are some details of using eir on the freenode website[1], the
main command that we expect to be used is the “btset” command, which
is used to add a comment and tell eir what action to take (if any)
when a ban expires. To integrate with the ban-tracker you must use the
“!btset” command in #ubuntu-ops-team, this is just so ubottu can see
the command and interpret it. The other commands can be used in /msg
or in the channel, and should just be ignored by ubottu.

Part of the reason for adding eir is better management of our
ban/quiet lists, automatic removal has been a long requested feature
for ubottu[2], though not really trivial to implement (with the
current Bantracker plugin). Though there are many scripts around for
IRC clients that can do this, they aren’t universal and obviously
require the operator remain connected to actually act. The eir bot
allows all of our operators access to this with none of the
restrictions, so it makes sense to use it, rather than duplicate its
functionally in ubottu (for now).

The IRC Council are now in the process of getting eir into #ubuntu and
#ubuntu-ops-team, eir will be configured to send notifications on
actions in #ubuntu to #ubuntu-ops-team. We expect this to be done over
the next day or so.

While we believe we are ready to introduce eir, we expect there may be
some configuration “tweaks” for eir over the next few days/weeks, so
we encourage feedback if you have any questions/comments.

[1] http://freenode.net/eir.shtml
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-bots/+bug/521842

Thanks for your time,
Terence Simpson (tsimpson)
On behalf of the IRC Council