Good morning,
On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Petr Bena <benapetr(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
You have the right to say anything, you've the duty to
prove it.
Could you support your three claims:
(i) only open source projects are allowed on Freenode
(ii) Wikimedia has an exception
(iii) Freenode can't scale with Wikimedia projects growth
According
http://freenode.net/policy.shtml, are accepted:
"Non-Software-Related Peer-Directed Project. Per the PDPC charter,
channels which serve projects combining open, informal participation
and broadly-licensed, widely-disseminated creative output are
considered to be on-topic. If you believe your non-software project
may meet the criteria for a non-software peer-directed project, please
consult a staffer or email support at freenode dot net. "
(...)
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
Please provide us a list of issues we currently have and the
solutions.
I fear you're doing a bold move made under false assumptions.
Our relations with the Freenode staff seems to be rather good and the
current statu quo works well.
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).
Do you have any idea how much
maintenance requires an IRC server?
Do you have any idea of the impact (DDoS flood for example) an IRC
server have to a network?
Do you have any idea of the skills, the time, the social contacts and
the energy required to maintain an IRC server?
Do you know how many corporates, universities linked to networks like
UnderNet, EFnet, IRCNet and Dalnet decided to not fight anymore those
battles and canceled their support?
I know we're on Freenode, a quieter network, but still... these are
experiences to take in account to avoid to find problems.
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)
Please give us two
samples of wiki projects who wanted to be on
Freenode but couldn't.
Please back your claim with prove people from any wiki would want:
(i) to be on IRC
(ii) to have a regular channel
(iii) to have this regular channel on the Freenode network
(iv) don't already have it / be denied / etc.
- 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.
What the IRC Group think
about that?
- 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
They're
automatically killed or by ircops?
If it's the first, we should configure them correctly, as it's an issue.
For example, look the eggdrop source code.There are 3 messages queues,
one "quick" processing virtually immediately, the "serv" as a regular
rate and the "help" which is throttled to avoid flood. Those settings
work since 1996. We could go read them, test them and recommend them
as best practices.
--
Sébastien Santoro aka Dereckson
http://www.dereckson.be/