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?
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