Since this message was cross-posted to Wikipedia-l, I'm forwarding my reply here as well.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] IRC question Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 00:43:34 -0700 From: Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com Reply-To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org References: 004d01c44c5e$ac5dc600$d100a8c0@arcsy.co.jp

Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

Hi, Why don't host IRC chanels on wikimedia servers ? (ie. irc.wikimedia.org)

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

If our servers are cut off, we could lose that communications channel as well. (This is already a risk with the mailing lists. We have an offsite backup MX but it doesn't always go smoothly.)

Also, IRC would be yet another service susceptible to load problems, denial of service attacks, and various abuses. I feel much more comfortable with the dedicated effort that the Freenode folks put into running an IRC network well.

Freenode may vanish day, we have better to get ready for that. It may be also nice to offer people under firewall a Web interface to be able to acces IRC even at office (as Shaihulud do for some of us with CGI:IRC).

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it; Freenode is a great resource, and serves a lot of free software projects and users. I don't understand why any planning is necessary when it's a simple matter of setting up a channel somewhere else.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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