4 ms·

I’ve never used IRC before so maybe someone can explain what the problem is here. My takeaway from reading this is that there are multiple irc networks. The au

by lovich 5y ago

I’ve never used IRC before so maybe someone can explain what the problem is here. My takeaway from reading this is that there are multiple irc networks. The author decided to move his bot and channel to a different network, and is angry that the freenode operator took back the abandoned channel. Is it expected in IRC channels that whoever started the channel owns it forever? What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it?

geofft 5y ago
Maybe here's an analogy: Verisign does something that YC doesn't like, so YC decides they don't trust being on .com anymore and they should move from ycombinator.com to ycombinator.party or something. They set up a web server that redirects from news.ycombinator.com to news.ycombinator.party, so that people who were looking for the old name still find it. Verisign decides that YC has abandoned the .com name, and points news.ycombinator.com at their own forum about news for hackers, with a target audience of fixed-point combinator enthusiasts. After all, "Y combinator" is just a term from a Haskell Curry paper. I think the norms around IRC are very similar to the norms around domains (or Twitter accounts, or so forth) - even if you use a somewhat generic name, whoever first lays claim to the name is entitled to keep it and do as much or as little with it, unless they affirmatively release it, and using the name to point someone elsewhere is definitely not abandoning it.
toast0 5y ago
> Is it expected in IRC channels that whoever started the channel owns it forever? What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it? It's been a long while since I was a regular IRC user and my channel was banned from channel services for reasons, but my understanding is that all the registrations have timeouts. If non of the channel operators show up in some period of time, the registration is cancelled. I'd imagine somewhere between 7 and 30 days would be the norm though.
ben0x539 5y ago
> What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it? I don't think this is a huge issue for IRC communities. Freenode in particular had a bureaucracy around #<name> channels to prevent this (and even that was rather ineffective in the single case I was almost-personally involved in), but ##<name> channels were explicitly more free-for-all.
lonjil 5y ago
Freenode has rules about these things. Topical channels stay owned for 60 days after they stop being used. Redirecting people to another network has also never been a problem on Freenode. Freenode's new owner claims that redirecting people is "spam", justifying removal of channel ops.

by lovich 5y ago

geofft 5y ago

Maybe here's an analogy: Verisign does something that YC doesn't like, so YC decides they don't trust being on .com anymore and they should move from ycombinator.com to ycombinator.party or something. They set up a web server that redirects from news.ycombinator.com to news.ycombinator.party, so that people who were looking for the old name still find it. Verisign decides that YC has abandoned the .com name, and points news.ycombinator.com at their own forum about news for hackers, with a target audience of fixed-point combinator enthusiasts. After all, "Y combinator" is just a term from a Haskell Curry paper. I think the norms around IRC are very similar to the norms around domains (or Twitter accounts, or so forth) - even if you use a somewhat generic name, whoever first lays claim to the name is entitled to keep it and do as much or as little with it, unless they affirmatively release it, and using the name to point someone elsewhere is definitely not abandoning it.

toast0 5y ago

> Is it expected in IRC channels that whoever started the channel owns it forever? What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it? It's been a long while since I was a regular IRC user and my channel was banned from channel services for reasons, but my understanding is that all the registrations have timeouts. If non of the channel operators show up in some period of time, the registration is cancelled. I'd imagine somewhere between 7 and 30 days would be the norm though.

ben0x539 5y ago

> What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it? I don't think this is a huge issue for IRC communities. Freenode in particular had a bureaucracy around #<name> channels to prevent this (and even that was rather ineffective in the single case I was almost-personally involved in), but ##<name> channels were explicitly more free-for-all.

lonjil 5y ago

Freenode has rules about these things. Topical channels stay owned for 60 days after they stop being used. Redirecting people to another network has also never been a problem on Freenode. Freenode's new owner claims that redirecting people is "spam", justifying removal of channel ops.