[Foundation-l] Status of cloak requests

[Dan Rosenthal]

The underlying problem with that is they are also able to tell  
legitimate complaints no.  It beholdens one of the methods of the  
Foundation's communications (official or not) to a 3rd party's  
policies, with zero oversight or enforcement from the foundation. And  
then, we're presented with problems like relying on a third party to  
protect our privacy with cloaks; newcomers that are disgusted and  
turned away by coming into our channels and seeing bot attacks that we  
are hamstrung from preventing due to stupid restrictions on ops by  
freenode; group contacts that have been criticized as being  
unavailable and unhelpful; drama involving logging policies etc.

We could bypass all of this by simply hosting the IRC server ourselves.

-Dan




On Feb 26, 2008, at 9:36 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> On 26/02/2008, Paul Williams <paul at skenmy.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Dan Rosenthal  
>> <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> A question that has been raised for some time. Freenode has issues
>>> beyond just the IRC cloaks.  Why aren't we having an
>>> irc.wikimedia.org?  There's really no good reason beyond "that's  
>>> just
>>> the way it is."
>
>> I have considerable experience in running IRC servers and networks.  
>> They
>> aren't particularly resource intensive - and the customisation  
>> facilities
>> are massive if you have backend access.
>> Just give me a shout if you need anything regarding this and i'd be  
>> more
>> than willing to help out.
>
>
> Lots of people around Wikimedia and its projects use IRC very
> effectively as a working tool, but the social project fallout on en:wp
> in particular from IRC use and suspicion of it is ... remarkable. (See
> the recent arbitration case for an example.)
>
> One important and useful byproduct of the Foundation's hands-off
> approach to Wikimedia IRC on Freenode is being able to tell people
> complaining to the Foundation to go away and ask James or Sean, both
> of whom are highly practiced in telling spurious complainants "no."
>
> I suppose if we had our own server they could get the job there too
> and do it in a similar way ... "Here, James, Sean, have this excellent
> chalice. Only a little poison!"
>
>
> - d.
>
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