I have never seen any such a channel for user support and developers which is getting flooded like this one. It's nearly unusable for people who are seeking help with mediawiki. If you really want to keep the bots in channel, we should create #mediawiki-help for people who are seeking that and don't want to be brought in channel where everyone ignores them because their support question is lost in the feeds. That isn't just unfriendly but it doesn't even make sense to have such a channel. Indeed it's useful for devs, but in this case we shouldn't use it as a support channel
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 2:16 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
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
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