Hi, thanks for your response!
First of all, I am not the guy who complained regarding the fact wikis are not accepted, I am just proposing another idea, but here are answers:
On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Sébastien Santoro dereckson@espace-win.org wrote:
Good morning,
On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
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.
You have the right to say anything, you've the duty to prove it.
Could you support your three claims: (i) only open source projects are allowed on Freenode (ii) Wikimedia has an exception (iii) Freenode can't scale with Wikimedia projects growth
1: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Hosts#See_also there is a reference 2: Wikipedia channels are allowed, the mere fact that others are not makes it an exception 3: I never said that
According http://freenode.net/policy.shtml, are accepted: "Non-Software-Related Peer-Directed Project. Per the PDPC charter, channels which serve projects combining open, informal participation and broadly-licensed, widely-disseminated creative output are considered to be on-topic. If you believe your non-software project may meet the criteria for a non-software peer-directed project, please consult a staffer or email support at freenode dot net. "
(...) 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
Please provide us a list of issues we currently have and the solutions.
I fear you're doing a bold move made under false assumptions. Our relations with the Freenode staff seems to be rather good and the current statu quo works well.
I already provided this list, just read either the https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Hosts#See_also or the previous e-mail
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).
Do you have any idea how much maintenance requires an IRC server?
Yes, I am an irc operator on one
Do you have any idea of the impact (DDoS flood for example) an IRC server have to a network?
Yes
Do you have any idea of the skills, the time, the social contacts and the energy required to maintain an IRC server?
Yes
Do you know how many corporates, universities linked to networks like UnderNet, EFnet, IRCNet and Dalnet decided to not fight anymore those battles and canceled their support?
No, neither I understand why you ask that
I know we're on Freenode, a quieter network, but still... these are experiences to take in account to avoid to find problems.
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)
Please give us two samples of wiki projects who wanted to be on Freenode but couldn't.
Again, I am not the guy complaining about this, I just come with another idea than proposed on wiki page, ask the guy who had troubles registering their project on freenode.
Please back your claim with prove people from any wiki would want: (i) to be on IRC (ii) to have a regular channel (iii) to have this regular channel on the Freenode network (iv) don't already have it / be denied / etc.
- 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.
What the IRC Group think about that?
- 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
They're automatically killed or by ircops?
They are killed by limits (ircd)
If it's the first, we should configure them correctly, as it's an issue.
For example, look the eggdrop source code.There are 3 messages queues, one "quick" processing virtually immediately, the "serv" as a regular rate and the "help" which is throttled to avoid flood. Those settings work since 1996. We could go read them, test them and recommend them as best practices.
I already proposed this once, response by people who operate these bots was: "there should be possibility to give some exception to these."
On other hand, the network services (u:lines) do have this exception. I don't think anyone would like to wait for chanserv 40 seconds to print its help. Just as when something went wrong on production there is a little point in waiting 2 minutes for nagios to print the messages.
-- Sébastien Santoro aka Dereckson http://www.dereckson.be/
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Your e-mail is definitely partially correct, but keep in mind that I am proposing wikimedia operation to offer a long term donation to freenode in form of server hosting, and I still don't see a simple reason why not to do that.