Hi all,
wm-bot, our fellow irc bot [0] has became more popular than I expected [1] and currently is being used in more than 90 channels. Unfortunately, freenode has a limit for maximum channels per user which is AFAIK little over 100 per user
Because I don't want to restrict users from being able to use bot because of this limitation (and freenode isn't willing to lift this limit to anyone) I am today releasing new "multi-instance" version of bot, which may be a bit buggy (report to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Tools&component=WM-... in case you find any)
Basically the primary change is that bot spawn multiple instances of its own on freenode (which in fact are still 1 program just using multiple connections to freenode) and these instances will randomly assign themselves to some of the channels currently wm-bot is in.
The functionality will be unchanged and basically only difference what regular IRC users will see is that in random channels wm-bot will be replaced with wm-bot2, however this change will bring a lot of troubles and complications to wm-bot operation (thus current bot operators will have far harder work), because in case of freenode outage (which happens quite often these days) when bot, or one of its instances disconnect, it will far harder to bring it back. Basically every instance is using own IRC bouncer, so it necessary to restart this bouncer and force bot to reconnect (I will post detailed instructions on wikitech so that people from ops or volunteer operators on labs can restart / fix the bot anytime)
Thank you for your patience and I apologize for all inconveniences connected to this maintenance :-) expect a little bot outage in upcoming minutes...
[0] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WM-Bot [1] http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/db/systemdata.htm