The Floodbots

[Alan Bell]

Hi all,
this email is to give you all a summary of the situation with the 
floodbots, a bit of background, and our current strategy to address the 
situation. Further discussion and comments are welcomed here or on IRC 
in #ubuntu-irc or #ubuntu-ops-team


What happened
==========
The floodbots have been withdrawn from service, as of February 3rd 2014, 
they are not coming back.

What the floodbots do
==============
The most visible function of the floodbots is to impose a quiet on 
people who accidentally paste multiple lines of text into the channel. 
This often happens when someone intends to share part of a log file with 
the channel and does not realise that this is propagated a line at a 
time to the thousands of users we have in the channel, disrupting other 
conversations and generally causing confusion.
As well as accidental pasting there is intentional pasting of spam and 
links by attention seeking individuals and automated bot attacks, the 
bots have information on bans and heuristics to detect names and hosts 
that are likely to be hostile.
The floodbots have extensive facilities for responding to ddos type 
situations, sometimes putting the channel into an emergency mode for 
just registered users, there is then a process in the #ubuntu-unregged 
channel where captchas are presented to users and the humans are allowed 
back into the main channel.
The bots will detect emergency situations, such as mass joins and can 
distinguish between ddos attacks and technical issues in the network
There are several floodbots normally active, they talk to each other to 
detect network latency and netsplits and to update their own code

Overall, the floodbots help us to regulate abuse of the IRC channels, 
but for perspective, this is just bytes on a wire. There is no actual 
harm or cost caused by someone pasting an excessive amount of lines in 
an IRC channel.

We have not recently seen attacks and/or abuse at the scale of what was 
happening at the time the floodbots were written. This might be because 
the floodbots are protecting us from it so well or we are less of a 
target than we were, or something else.

The options
=======

1) we can do nothing, and not have these features
   -  not ideal, would be extra workload and/or a worse experience for 
people in the larger channels, but this is basically what we have been 
doing since they were turned off and the world has not ended.

2) we can get a different accidental paste protection plugin for ubottu 
or another bot and have just that feature
   -  these exist and could be used without much fuss, that would 
provide the most visible bit of floodbot functionality

3) we can rewrite more of the floodbot functionality into ubottu or 
something else, aiming for feature parity at some point
   -  this could take some time, it seems unlikely that we would get as 
far as the existing floodbots do

4) we can move to +r+z in the large channels and make a bot to help 
users to register on the network to talk, people would join read-only 
and have to register to talk, like most websites.
   -  this could be done, it would be a massive simplification of the 
problem; however it has significant disadvantages in terms of the end 
user experience for people new to IRC.

5) we can try to resolve whatever issue was the motivation for shutting 
the floodbots down
   -  We don't want anyone to feel bad about their contributions to the 
Ubuntu project, but this might be hard to fix. If we could then that 
would be great, but we should not sustain a situation where we do not 
have the freedom to use, inspect, modify and share the software that we 
are using. We don't put up with that for any other software, even 
freedom zero is provided by most proprietary software and today that is 
what has gone from the floodbots.

and finally, for completeness

6) we can bring the existing floodbot code back on line with new 
freeserve account information as it has GPL v2 boilerplate headers
   -  this isn't a good option, LJL has asserted that he didn't intend 
to distribute it under that license. Arguing that point is unlikely to 
lead to any kind of happy outcome, we are not going to do it.

What we plan to do
============

Right now we are at option one, the do nothing option. We are working on 
option 2 to bring online some paste prevention, and have it available as 
soon as possible. For the last two days we have been running without the 
floodbots and we have had some impact on the channels, which was 
manually responded to. We could set the channel(s) to +r+z should there 
be unusual activity, returning to the normal state of affairs ASAP.

If there is a perceived view that this is not sufficient, then we will 
consider a more complete flood protection via #3 but we do not intend to 
reuse the current floodbot's codebase. In other words, we do not see #6 
as being an option; and -- at least right now -- cannot see option 5, 
redeploying the existing floodbots, without a Free Software codebase as 
a viable option.



AlanBell, on behalf of The IRC Council

-- 
Libertus Solutions
http://libertus.co.uk