[Foundation-l] First IRC Group Contacts 'surgery' held this evening, cloak backlog (almost) cleared (yay)

[Sean Whitton]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 19:34, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another problem I see, but not sure how important it is, is that this
> would make Wikimedia possibly responsible (legally speaking) for the
> communication through IRC etc, which might not be wanted. Nowadays we
> can just point to freenode, which handles it all, and will be taking
> action when required.

This is the number one reason, at the end of the day, why we wouldn't
want to do it. IRC is not something WMF really wants on its list of
legal concerns - the wikis are bad enough ;)

> Besides that, I don't think that the extra software maintaining will
> cost developers the most time, but that the nagging users will. Users
> that come for small issues to the developers because sean and/or james
> are for a while away, and (disaster!) the cloaks can't be set for a
> while. now people turn to Freenode, which is perfectly able to handle
> it, doing nothing else practically, either by fixing either by telling
> them to have patience. When Wikimedia developers have technical
> control over the channels and nicks etc, this would mean mainly an
> additional workload on that behalf, would be my expectation.

Indeed, freenode staff are very good (although I'm biased of course)
at dealing with people's issues. We've reset hundreds of passwords,
we've helped with hundreds of ChanServ problems. It seems silly to
abandon that service.