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This happened to me. I maintain a pretty small macOS open source application and our IRC home was on freenode. I decided to move it to Libera, so I updated our
by cmsj 5y ago
This happened to me. I maintain a pretty small macOS open source application and our IRC home was on freenode. I decided to move it to Libera, so I updated our website/docs accordingly and set the topic on the freenode channel to point at Libera.
At ~5am UK time today both myself and the other channel founder were removed from the ACLs and the topic was set to one like that shown in the LWN article.
I was able to get founder access back by asking nicely (through gritted teeth) on #freenode-services and now I am trying to work out how I indicate to users that they should look elsewhere, without freenode taking any further action.
- p_l 5y agoPut in a bot that responds to every user who has spoken for the first time in X timeframe with NOTICE about moving to new location?
- cmsj 5y agoI don't have a source I can cite, but I'm hearing indirectly that freenode's current policy is that a bot doing something like that is not allowed :/
- p_l 5y agoAny method of mentioning that the channel isn't an official channel anymore is illegal by new policy
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoIronic that the network's name has the words "free" in them. The way Andrew Lee is acting, he sounds like he's more the North Korean version of Korea...
- jackson1442 5y agoYou mean the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Yup, sounds about right.
- Vektorweg 5y agoits times like these when you ignore the rules
- CydeWeys 5y agoAnd it's time like these where you immediately get banned for ignoring said rules.
- cmsj 5y agoOh good grief, really? I had gone for the "Unofficial Foo Channel, see http://foo.org/blah http://foo.org/blah" :/
- arpa 5y agoEggdrop with auto-greet message?
- sputr 5y agoEggdrop is still a thing? Damn. It's been for ever.
- kristofferR 5y agoWe're talking about IRC here, after all...
- stormcode 5y ago.... Haven't been active on IRC since 1996. .... Can still understand exactly what is being talked about here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jerf 5y ago"For an explanation of why nobody is here, see https://blahblahblah https://blahblahblah." I'm not an IRC guy but I'm sure URLs are fairly common in topics. A human might still get offended but this will get past a bot. Heck, even something like "For information about channel etiquette, see https:/blahblahblah" would do. It just turns out that "channel etiquette" is to move to a different channel. It only has to hold for a little while anyhow. I'm sure there's going to be a long tail of people logging in for the first time in months and wondering what happened, but by now the majority probably already know, if not the vast majority.
- darkwater 5y agoWhat about setting the channel topic to a link to your own documentation where it states how you should access the IRC channel? And maybe also a bot as someone else suggested, that reminds you to... read the channel topic. If they are going to scrape every single link in the channel topics and look for libera.chat links then there is not much you can do, people will eventually migrate.
- praptak 5y ago> If they are going to scrape every single link in the channel topics and look for libera.chat links then there is not much you can do There's a lot you can do, there's a bunch of anti-scraping techniques like printing the "libera" using JavaScript.
- FireBeyond 5y agoIRC channel topics are plain text. They don't parse JavaScript.
- praptak 5y agoI know. GPs solution was to point them to a URL which you control, with a suggestion that FN owners would go as far as to scrape these. Edit: they are obviously already filtering the topics themselves.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yesco 5y agoMaybe just make a pastebin or something that explains the move and link users to that instead?
- blihp 5y agoSet up a support / resources landing page on your web site and set the IRC topic to point to that. People who connect to freenode will figure it out pretty quickly. Generally a good idea to always have a pointer to a page you control like this any time you're using someone else's server/service. You never know when something like this is going to happen and it provides you a way to communicate when/if it does.
- izacus 5y ago> I was able to get founder access back by asking nicely (through gritted teeth) on #freenode-services and now I am trying to work out how I indicate to users that they should look elsewhere, without freenode taking any further action. Why do you need to do that though? Freenode and all other IRC servers are full of channels where people hang out and talk about projects without maintainers owning them and pushing people around. This is, after all, the main plus of IRC. Just leave Freenode and advertise your presence on your website/GitHub or other project channels. Leave people deciding to stay on Freenode alone.
- darkarmani 5y ago> Just leave Freenode and advertise your presence on your website/GitHub or other project channels. Leave people deciding to stay on Freenode alone. Because it looks like an official channel? Having a topic telling people where they can find the official channel is not bothering people: most people don't know where to go and are only on freenode because thats where they think they should be.
- izacus 5y agoOf course, having a topic is all good. But what some channel owners did is to prevent people from talking on the channel via bans, tried to block discussion and forcefully make people move over. That, in my book, is not ok.
- shkkmo 5y agoThe position you advocate is ridiculous. If the official channel is moving, prohibiting that channel from telling thier users where the new official channel will be is incredibly user hostile. I can't believe any project would ever want to stay on Freenode after behavior like this.
- cmsj 5y agoIn the long term, you are absolutely right. It's perfectly reasonable for people to want to have a #gentoo or #ubuntu or whatever, channel on Freenode. I also think it's reasonable for projects to have some time to disambiguate where the official one is. For my project specifically, our IRC traffic is very low - there are a dozen or so lurkers and then people who come in briefly after seeing the channel mentioned on our website/docs, to ask questions. I've updated all of those things, but I want to leave a message in the channel topic for people who already have it in their IRC client, to see, so they don't think I've completely abandoned them. My solution for now is to have the topic say that it's an unofficial channel in which people are welcome to discuss things, and then a URL to the section of our website that details how to get help, which links to Libera :)
- Exuma 5y agoPostgresql simply just links to their site which mentions Libera, and that community is enormous.