[Foundation-l] Status of cloak requests

[Sean Whitton]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the position of the foundation was and it that it does not
> want to get officially involved with IRC (nota: the Group Contacts
> were not appointed by the foundation, they act as representatives [or
> benevolent dictators...] of the Wikimedia IRC community).
>
> Thus, I presume the office won't want to make an official request to
> Freenode, the only people who could do this are James and Sean.

This is precisely the reason the office are not involved and also the
reason that we do not run our own IRC server. IRC is extremely
volatile and as staff there are so many things we have to be careful
of (legally we are not allowed to hold the hostnames of under-13s in
our logs, for example). Also, freenode's routing and server
administration staff are very highly skilled and at present they
ensure that the network is up and has great redundancy due to having
so many servers. Running our own server, we would never get this. Yes,
many of us (including myself) could run the ircd software on a
Wikimedia box, but freenode know what they are doing with regard to
keeping IRC networks going.

>
> Further, As Sean is also a Freenode staffer, I trust that he knows
> what is going on and what we can expect of Freenode at the moment and
> what not. I doubt whether any official request would speed matters
> up...

Unfortunately it wouldn't. To be specific, yes it is poor that only
one person can sort out the relationship between Wikimedia and
freenode, but this is set to change. Per the freenode staffblog, it
can be seen that improvements to the slow system are in the works. We
must be patient!

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:36 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> 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!"

Yes. As soon as the foundation takes responsibility, it jumps into a
cauldron of hot water. How it is now we avoid that problem and yet get
a great service from freenode, apart from these last few weeks.

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 6:36 AM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)
> <newyorkbrad at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Because IP's can be easily harvested when
> > people go into the IRC channels uncloaked, this is a user privacy
> > issue and needs to be resolved at the earliest possible time.
>
> Most IRC users do not have a large problem with this.  However, if one
> feels that they should still be cloaked before they receive their
> Wikimedia-related cloak, they can request an "unaffiliated" cloak in
> #freenode at any time.  (They have to set their nick up the same way
> as you do to receive a Wikimedia cloak, though.)

Thanks Casey. While waiting for your WIkimedia cloak, grab an
unaffiliated of freenode staff.

I hope Wikimedia can accept that freenode are having difficulty now
but can sort it out and help us in the way they have served our needs
for many a successful year.

Thanks,

Sean