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Comment by Zev | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but I have to disagree with you completely and stand beside Freenode's decision.

As someone who is an ircop on another network with a few thousand users that also blocks Mibbit, abuse is not a red herring at all.

The last time Mibbit was unbanned on the network, it was used repeatedly for users to evade channel bans and harass users. Implementing a non-standard protocol that only Mibbit seems to use is not a valid answer to this problem.

IMHO, its a sad day when a single, relatively new client (that displays ads/produces income for), feels that it is important enough for a network that has been around much longer to bend its policy to work around. And then have the gall to accuse the network of wanting to make a profit itself?

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Implementing a non-standard protocol that only Mibbit seems to use is not a valid answer to this problem.

WEBIRC is the standard solution to this, and it existed long before Mibbit did. It's also about as simple and obvious as a protocol could be: the web server simply forwards the user's IP address on to the ircd at the start of a session.

>> "Implementing a non-standard protocol that only Mibbit seems to use is not a valid answer to this problem."

We currently have WEBIRC setup with 454 IRC networks, representing around 200k users. I hardly think that's a "non standard protocol that only mibbit seems to use" is it now. All modern IRC servers support it out of the box.

I don't think I indicated freenode was planning to make a profit out of their client, you'd have to ask them about that. I wish them all the luck.

This isn't about me, or money, etc. This is about them cutting off users, who used mibbit to connect to freenode. IMHO that's a bad decision, and not a nice open friendly thing to do.

It'd be like hackernews blocking opera users if some spam submissions were submitted by opera users.

Given there are thousands of IRC networks around, < 500 supporting the protocol is a drop in the sea. And many IRCD's need a plugin that doesn't come standard for it. Hardly out of the box. And by non-stanard, I simply meant it wasn't in IRC's RFC.

I'm not claiming Freenode was standing to make a profit from this; you did: "* It makes money" — I also mentioned that you stand to lose money if a major network doesn't let users use your client. I'm not claiming this is your motive for wanting people to use Mibbit. I don't know what you think. Just that from an outside perspective, its a possible thought.

And I don't see the Opera comparison. Opera doesn't force users to proxy through their own servers. Its a completely transparent tool, right out of the box. Users have to actively set up a proxy for Opera to use it. With Mibbit? It uses the proxy by default, no way around it for the users.

> I'm not claiming Freenode was standing to make a profit from this; you did: "* It makes money"

I think that you should re-read that unless you are saying he said that Freenode "Isn't open source" as well...

It'd be like hackernews blocking opera users if some spam submissions were submitted by opera users.

No, it would be like HackerNews blocking a 3rd party HN client that:

* Required that HackerNews trust the third party client service to provide user identity.

* Had a significantly higher level of abuse as compared to standard users.

* Required a disproportionate amount of resources to support for the given user base.

* (Least important) monetized HackerNews via advertisements.

And then have the gall to accuse the network of wanting to make a profit itself?

To be fair, I was the first one making that accusation (not axod) and I clearly indicated that it was a tinfoil hat moment - time will tell, but the banning of mibbit and the implementation of their own webchat client (well, currently a default installation of an open source client) is awfully convenient given axod wrote a post on mibbit's revenue only the day before.

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