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

[David Gerard]

2008/7/28 Sean Whitton <sean at silentflame.com>:
> 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 ;)
[...]
> 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.


Yuh. Running an IRC network is useful insofar as it directly advances
the mission statement. That is to say, not very. The Foundation has
made donations to Freenode before in recognition of the benefit it
gets from IRC, but Freenode are much better at running an IRC network
than the Foundation ever really wants to bother becoming. Outsourcing
can be a very good idea at times.

I mean, it's possible it's worth the effort of doing it in-house -
Greg thinks it wouldn't be overwhelming - but I still can't say I'm
personally convinced.


- d.