[Foundation-l] First IRC Group Contacts 'surgery' held this evening, cloak backlog (almost) cleared (yay)

Mon Jul 28 10:21:46 UTC 2008

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 22:14, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
> One question I neglected to ask, earlier: is there anything we as
> individual users can do to be more helpful, with this whole situation?

Not really, no: there is very little James and I can do ourselves
except poke freenode every few weeks. The thing I would ask is that
information like that which was given out at the meeting is spread to
stop people ending up with different views about what can and can't be
done. That's why I set up the pages on meta, to try and clear up these
misconceptions.

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 00:48, mike.lifeguard <mike.lifeguard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are bot cloaks being done now that you can do Wikipedia and Wikimedia
> cloaks?

Yes, I intend to do a run of these this morning.

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 03:28, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> "no idea of an ETA" doesn't sound too good. Wikia has been waiting 6
> months just for freenode to recognise a new group contact. Has there
> been any discussion about moving to a new network?

The discussions were had, but the issue is that actually, we get a
heck of a lot out of freenode. The network is well run in terms of
routing and sysadminship (as freenode staff I have nothing to do with
that area but we have a very skilled team who do) and freenode also
allow us special exemptions: Wikimedians can request the ability to
join more than twenty channels, we have bots that are allowed
exemption from flood protection, and the toolserver has a higher
connection limit.

It is important to remember that the only thing freenode have got
wrong is their group contact system, but in my experience what
generally happens is suddenly, everything will happen. That's what
happened when NickServ and ChanServ were recently changed over to
(much better) software, and I predict this will end up happening with
the groups system too. Eventually.