Factoid changes

[Alan Bell]

Hi all,

Inspired by the open letter of October and subsequent discussions we 
have had a review of factoids and how they are used, this email is a 
summary of the changes that have been made and why. Full details and 
background discussion may be found here http://pad.ubuntu.com/factoids 
and here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/IRCC/20140319
In short, many of the factoids have been considered to be over-used and 
there was a feeling that new users in particular don't like to be 
reprimanded by an automated tool, it can be confusing and generally not 
friendly to humans. As the majority of IRC users are likely to be human 
there should be more of a focus on talking to people than using the bot 
to do it for us.
This review is going to lead to some bot commands not doing anything, 
there are a few hanging aliases to clean up as well, some people might 
find that their favorite factoid has now been removed (mine was !ohmy, 
delivered in a George Takei voice) so we should consider how else we can 
manage the situation that would have caused us to use the bot command, 
or we can put some of them back if they are considered useful. The great 
thing about making changes on IRC is that it is just bits on a wire and 
every decision can be reversed if we get it wrong, so with that, here 
are the changes:


!language !english
This was considered to be a heavily over-used factoid, perhaps a little 
too much language policing. We like the channels to be not sweary, with 
nothing that wouldn't get into a Pixar film, but if someone is being 
occasionally mildly rude expressing frustration without directing it at 
anyone then just mentioning it or leading by example is better than 
calling a bot command. We reworded this factoid to:
The main Ubuntu channels require that you speak in calm, polite English. 
For other languages, please visit https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList

!enter
we removed this factoid, overused and too grumpy

!repeat
we decided to keep this one

!anyone
removed this one

!behavior !etiquette !attitude
these were aliased to !guidelines
The guidelines for using the Ubuntu channels can be found here: 
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/Guidelines

!best
removed

!who
keeping this one

!away
we are going to look into stopping this from working in the channels 
directly, it is useful to be able to do !away>nick from a private 
message with the bot or from the -ops channel, but calling the !away 
factoid in a large channel isn't really helping matters, it just adds to 
clutter and probably won't be seen by the person who is away, but a 
direct message to the user is more likely to be seen.

!pm
keeping this one, but we removed part of it, the factoid now reads:
Please ask your questions in the channel so that other people can help 
you, benefit from your questions and answers, and ensure that you're not 
getting bad advice.

!elaborate !work
work was a bit sarcastic, we aliased it to elaborate

!punctuation
got rid of it, a few extra bits on the wire don't hurt anyone

!coc
we like this one

!canibeanop
great info here

!ask
bit of a discussion about it, but we ended up keeping it.


Alan.

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