Freenode IRC operators now engaging in routine abuses of power
devever.net
devever.net
There's a fair mention of "IRC drama" in these comments and I'll say this: IRC has drama in the same way that HN does. The volume of people that call this place "the orange site" or refer to "HN's culture" while chiding about certain comments is orthogonal to the drama that happens in IRC. The difference is that you don't have dang as a mediator. Freenode (and now Libera) leave much of the operation up to channel owners, even if they want to put in place ridiculous rules. These operators are held to very little, it takes a large margin of abuse for them to be relieved of their channels. There's also a non-insignificant amount of people that believe bans are mostly earned, even if they're for ridiculous rules.
So, while I get this drama looks pathetic, it's the same kind of drama that occurs here that outside observers would like also declare pathetic.
Strikes me as sort of 'domain squatting'
>Primary channels do not expire with inactivity, though they can be claimed at any time by a representative of an on-topic project with the appropriate name. Topical channels expire after 60 days in which no user on the access list for the channel has joined it.
##hntop is a topical channel, since it begins with ##.
You and I have very, very different definitions of spam. I see a guidepost giving me direction.
People are concerned that you don't have the community's best interests at heart. Your actions say you don't have the community's best interests at heart.
All this lawyering corpspeak means nothing when your actions don't back it up.
If you want to prove us wrong, walk the walk.
edit:
Looking at the list of top10 channels[0], several of them have such notices in their topics. If this takeover was policy, can we assume you'll do the same to ##linux? Or is it a very selective policy only to be enforced when you have a personal interest or believe you can get away with it?
the original creator of the channel gained trust by their userbase to not do untowards things with the feed, like filtering out certain things
then they moved their project elsewhere and left a redirect in the old location
now rasengan has deleted the redirect and pretends nothing has happened, and as for trustworthiness ... note how in the screenshot at the end of the article, humblebot is killed after posting a link to this submission here
Putting "=Username" at the end to see if the user has an account on the very site we're discussing this on is pretty far from documenting identifying information, no?
https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/commit/1194a3e71a427a669...
I mean, we're not talking about someone hijacking an ad-rich youtube channel here. This is the "##hntop" channel. It reposts top news from... this very site. It's something anyone reading this comment can get for free by pressing the back button on their browser.
And yet someone still decides it's worth their effort to kick an admin (or I guess in this case force the channel registration) and steal it? Good grief.
Mod drama on reddit for instance is fairly incredible in scope and dedication. For some people being a mod seems to be effectively a full time activity and getting to mod as many subreddits as possible an objective, regardless of whether you have any particular interest in the sub in question. It's absolutely baffling to me because you'd have to pay me to do that job, but clearly some people thrive on this type of power.
Of course, when you run the network, you can do what you want. But then, that's the point of the move.
It's like you had mysite.com, decided to rename it to a new domain and so put a redirect. And then the CEO of the DNS authority decided to take your domain for himself, put a copy of your previous site on it and pretended that you never moved it in the first place.
And he's justifying this as "spamming". Because OP's said in the topic of HIS channel that the channel moved to libera.
He could've easily just joined his bot to the channel to keep the news going, fine. But removing OP's note about moving elsewhere is what rubs me the wrong way about this.
In my opinion, this is a graver offense than, say, someone using an exploit or similar to take over a channel. This person is supposed to be in a position of power and trust.
I'm a little surprised someone hasn't written some sort of plugin for common IRC clients to support at least minimal encryption in PMs.
that said.. someone using dcc chat probably should consider encryption (if they use dcc at all) given that it could be sniffed elsewhere.
I think it's clear that, at best, they don't want this discussion on the site, or at worst, rasengan is demanding it.
Andrew Lee has sought to purchase/influence other similar sites in the past.
For what it's worth, there's a lot of drama mongering in the whole FN saga, and it's usually the same arguments repeated on all sides - the HN mods are known to push this kind of story down after a while. No need to resort to conspiracy crap.
My takeaway from reading this is that there are multiple irc networks. The author decided to move his bot and channel to a different network, and is angry that the freenode operator took back the abandoned channel.
Is it expected in IRC channels that whoever started the channel owns it forever? What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it?
Verisign does something that YC doesn't like, so YC decides they don't trust being on .com anymore and they should move from ycombinator.com to ycombinator.party or something. They set up a web server that redirects from news.ycombinator.com to news.ycombinator.party, so that people who were looking for the old name still find it.
Verisign decides that YC has abandoned the .com name, and points news.ycombinator.com at their own forum about news for hackers, with a target audience of fixed-point combinator enthusiasts. After all, "Y combinator" is just a term from a Haskell Curry paper.
I think the norms around IRC are very similar to the norms around domains (or Twitter accounts, or so forth) - even if you use a somewhat generic name, whoever first lays claim to the name is entitled to keep it and do as much or as little with it, unless they affirmatively release it, and using the name to point someone elsewhere is definitely not abandoning it.
It's been a long while since I was a regular IRC user and my channel was banned from channel services for reasons, but my understanding is that all the registrations have timeouts. If non of the channel operators show up in some period of time, the registration is cancelled. I'd imagine somewhere between 7 and 30 days would be the norm though.
I don't think this is a huge issue for IRC communities.
Freenode in particular had a bureaucracy around #<name> channels to prevent this (and even that was rather ineffective in the single case I was almost-personally involved in), but ##<name> channels were explicitly more free-for-all.
Your memories got nicer with time.
Reminder that the internet was always the internet, from 1994, although the story is about USENET: https://www.wired.com/1994/05/alt-tasteless/
> This channel has moved to Liberachat, effective immediately
To be fair, this is a very gray area and is not a cut-and-dry example of abuse of power. The op did express that they were moving on to Libera. Is the expectation that someone could squat (as per the new channel description) a channel for all perpetuity, even if they no longer participate on the platform?
Conversely, rasengan really should have first had a conversation with the op, and did pull the trigger on this suspiciously quickly.
It's like that on some of the less-modern networks like EFnet. For a long time there were no services to automatically grant channel operator status and so folks would either amass a network of trusted humans large enough to pass the +o flag between each other as timezones awoke and went about their days, and/or they would herd large flocks of bots to perform the same.
freenode has always allowed communities to direct their channels to other platforms.
>Topical channels [ones that begin with ##] are given out on a first-come, first-served basis. They will expire if unused for a long time, see our policies for details regarding when this occurs. You can contact us on IRC with a request to take over an expired topical channel.
—from https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces
>Topical channels expire after 60 days in which no user on the access list for the channel has joined it.
—from https://freenode.net/policies
Historical precedent shows that channels (both primary ones in the # namespace, and topical ones) are closed when they conflict with policies and there is no way to resolve the conflict, and closures are enforced by services, which restrict access to such channels for any users trying to join. I've both been in channels closed by staff, as well as had one of my channels closed due to such policy conflicts. My channel has since been reopened, once I showed legitimate interest to staff in complying with network policy.
The rules as used in practice seem to have changed according to the original blog post.
Parent post made a claim that this was not an "abuse of power" and I was clarifying how it was indeed an abuse of power.
Apparently the policies are in the process of being redrafted in response to this, so in the future, what Lee did with ##hntop may very well reflect the actual policies of the network.
I really think that is the expectation. I can see reasonable exceptions for specific important channels, where someone abandons an active channel that is a valuable community resource and it is transferred to another caretaker who has some sort of mandate from the community. Even that could be seen as a bit sketchy, imo, and there is precedent for just choosing another channel name rather than going against community norms.
In this case, I think it's hard to argue that the channel just had to continue to function and so protocol had to be breached. The raised eyebrows this is getting are justified, imo.
Edit: I guess https://xkcd.com/1782/ makes that point better.
I wonder if people that really suffered from abuse of power will use the same term in this case.
- I spent years in prison because of corrupt judge.
- oh, that's nothing! Once I was using IRC when...
Hey now, there are plenty of corners in reddit that are less annoying than my HN comments. We're for sure more self-important here, though.
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact freenode support.
Secondly, you come to conclusions that have no basis from your explanation. To be clear, freenode doesn’t “tap” private messages.
How does this address any criticism?
[1] https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/pull/513/commits/2037126...