FloodBot status

[Alan Bell]

On 05/02/14 00:32, ljlbox at tiscali.it wrote:
>
> The FloodBots have been disabled in #ubuntu.
>
OK
>
> They have more than once been said to be (no longer) very useful, and 
> often said to be a kludge. I don't think it makes sense to have them 
> anymore, especially after I was made aware the IRCC has considered 
> removing them as an experiment, but never really did, during times 
> when "certain fun happens".
>
I have absolutely no idea what that is referring to, the IRCC certainly 
hasn't considered or discussed removing them in the last two years.
>
> The FloodBot code had been on Launchpad at 
> https://launchpad.net/floodbot since early 2012, with the 
> understanding, in concert with the IRCC, that after people would step 
> up to clean up and improve the code, eventually it would be made open 
> source. Nobody stepped up, and eventually, the Launchpad project was 
> locked by Canonical because "private" project became only acceptable 
> under payment, according to the email I received.
>
I read through the code when it was put in the launchpad project, I 
reviewed it again today, it looks pretty good to me. I would be up for 
improving it, if I had anything about it to improve. Same goes for 
cleaning, it might be best to have a separate file with the various 
constants and configuration parameters in it, but that would mean 
changing the propagate routine that currently updates it as a single 
file, once I figured out that doing the cleanup I wanted to do would 
lead to modifying that I figured the costs of doing it didn't outweigh 
the benefits. I don't think the bzr repo is locked, I think you just 
can't file private bugs in it or something. I would also note that there 
was a request from a freenode staffer to add ~freenode-staff to the 
project so they could help with the review and cleanup, but you didn't 
want us to open it up to them, so we didn't. As you were keen not to 
have many people with access to the code it kind of fell to the few 
people who did have access to it, I am not sure what the others thought, 
but I thought the code was fine.
>
> I would like to point out that the FloodBot code is under my exclusive 
> copyright, it has never been licensed for redistribution, and any 
> license text it may even have contained was provisional and only meant 
> for internal use.
>
it does indeed have a GPLv2 boilerplate at the top of it.
>
> Further use or distribution of the FloodBot code is NOT authorized by 
> the copyright holder; any exception would have to be agreed upon in 
> private, and I would confirm it on this mailing list.
>
any particular reason for that, and any reason for disabling them? I 
have been rather inattentive of IRC over the last month or so, with 
other things going on in real life, I feel I have missed some important 
bit of context here.

Alan.


-- 
I work at http://libertus.co.uk