[Foundation-l] Status of cloak requests

Tue Feb 26 14:54:13 UTC 2008

The underlying problem with that is they are also able to tell  
legitimate complaints no.  It beholdens one of the methods of the  
Foundation's communications (official or not) to a 3rd party's  
policies, with zero oversight or enforcement from the foundation. And  
then, we're presented with problems like relying on a third party to  
protect our privacy with cloaks; newcomers that are disgusted and  
turned away by coming into our channels and seeing bot attacks that we  
are hamstrung from preventing due to stupid restrictions on ops by  
freenode; group contacts that have been criticized as being  
unavailable and unhelpful; drama involving logging policies etc.

We could bypass all of this by simply hosting the IRC server ourselves.

-Dan

On Feb 26, 2008, at 9:36 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> On 26/02/2008, Paul Williams <paul at skenmy.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Dan Rosenthal  
>> <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> A question that has been raised for some time. Freenode has issues
>>> beyond just the IRC cloaks.  Why aren't we having an
>>> irc.wikimedia.org?  There's really no good reason beyond "that's  
>>> just
>>> the way it is."
>
>> I have considerable experience in running IRC servers and networks.  
>> They
>> aren't particularly resource intensive - and the customisation  
>> facilities
>> are massive if you have backend access.
>> Just give me a shout if you need anything regarding this and i'd be  
>> more
>> than willing to help out.
>
>
> Lots of people around Wikimedia and its projects use IRC very
> effectively as a working tool, but the social project fallout on en:wp
> in particular from IRC use and suspicion of it is ... remarkable. (See
> the recent arbitration case for an example.)
>
> One important and useful byproduct of the Foundation's hands-off
> approach to Wikimedia IRC on Freenode is being able to tell people
> complaining to the Foundation to go away and ask James or Sean, both
> of whom are highly practiced in telling spurious complainants "no."
>
> I suppose if we had our own server they could get the job there too
> and do it in a similar way ... "Here, James, Sean, have this excellent
> chalice. Only a little poison!"
>
>
> - d.
>
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