Platonides wrote:
It's yet another channel to join, keep an eye on, add to autojoin. We start with a negative weight.
#mediawiki bots give useful, human-generated content. Compare with tsnag at #wikimedia-toolserver, that's a nagios bot that spits out warnings quite frequently on its own. There's little utility other than ignoring it.
What do #mediawiki bots report?
- A person created a bug. We want that.
- Someone commented a bug (sometimes more relevant than others, but also
useful)
- A new patchset
- A new comment
They are *useful* data. How many bugs advanced just because someone commented it and then a bunch of developers looked at it from the wikibugs log?
Yes to this and yes to the rest of you what you wrote in this post.
The issue here seems to be that we need smarter (or saner) bots, not a separate channel. We wouldn't allow users to output so much noise in the channel, even if it were relevant to MediaWiki. It's called flooding and it's a not a particularly new or interesting problem. Just don't have the bots flood and people won't mind them nearly as much.
And if people still do mind the bots, they can ignore the bots easily enough client-side. If people want a feed channel as a unified stream, I think every bot should be able to easily support that. But having some reporting in #mediawiki is nice and useful.
MZMcBride