Hi,
One developer recently complained about some freenode policies,
specifically that wiki projects (wikipedia etc has some kind of
exception) are no longer allowed to be hosted on freenode network,
which is supposed to host only opensource projects. It's fact that as
the wikimedia project is becoming more large the freenode is getting
less and less suitable. Right now there is a page [1] where are
discussed other options for IRC. One of the options is to leave
freenode and set up own wikimedia IRC network, which has lot of
benefits but also lot of issues (moving to another network is
complicated given to number of channels and users).
I would like to propose another idea, and that is, instead of leaving
freenode, to improve the relations with the freenode staff and
eventually ask them to change some of the restrictions to fit better
to our needs. On other hand we could offer them various services in
return, for example the wikimedia foundation has made few donations to
freenode in past. If we consider the amount of hardware resources we
have, it shouldn't be problem to offer freenode for example a
dedicated or virtual server running on our cluster, which could host
one or more of their ircd servers (our technical / operation community
is far larger than freenode's so there should be absolutely no problem
setting this up and keeping it maintained). This would be perfect kind
of long term support to freenode network in return for their services
they offer to wikimedia project and it could eventually improve the
relations with freenode so they would allow to improve some of their
policies, specifically:
- The wiki-projects (which are often related to mediawiki software or
developers, even some other companies / projects are affiliated with
MW development) should be allowed to be hosted on freenode, so that
the community of these projects shouldn't find it so hard to reach the
technical support of mediawiki (right now they would have to be on
multiple networks given that #mediawiki is hosted on freenode, but
wiki projects in general are not allowed to be hosted there)
- There is a limit defined by freenode to have maximal number of 4
Group contacts, who are people dealing with cloaks and various staff
related issues. The wikimedia project currently have 4 Group contacts,
so it's quite impossible to enlarge this team. Right now it takes some
time for cloak requests to be processed and in future this number of
people could not be sufficient. Freenode should make it possible for
large projects like wikimedia to have some better options.
- Technical channels have lot of services like nagios bots, these bots
are getting often killed for flooding, because they need to send a lot
of text in short time, it should be possible to define exceptions for
these services to allow sending bigger amount of data in channels
What do you think of this?
<refs>
1
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Hosts