Factoid changes

[cprofitt]

Alan and team:

Thanks for conducting this meeting and taking steps to address the
factoids. While this may seem small to some I was pleased to see the
team working together in the meeting today.

Charles

On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 00:25 +0000, Alan Bell wrote:
> 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
> 
>