Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat? | Hacker News Reader

Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat?

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8 pointsterpua15 comments

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I wonder what the bot is called. I don't like the idea at all.

Sounds like a great idea to me. Anything that cuts down the repetitive questions is great.

For instance in ##javascript, half the questions posed end with the answer "Use a closure".

These are public channels anyway, archiving them seems fine to me. I'm surprised google hasn't got in on this yet.

There are two issues, as this guy says:

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/irseeking-trouble

1. They didn't ask.

2. While IRC isn't private, you should be made aware if someone's logging it, and frankly I'm not really in favor of logging it in any case, as it detracts from the more informal nature of it.

Yeah I do agree to a certain extent. Forum posts are obviously going to be archived, and examined, and remain public. Chat-rooms seem more of a grey area to me. I can see enormous use to archiving and mining the data, but on the other hand it does look slightly creepy being able to search and find some inane conversation I might have had months ago when I was in a silly mood.

While I do sort of agree, I learned long ago that nearly all channels are logged anyway since years by some channelbots. Often enough including statistics which will tell how many lines you wrote, when you where last online and that you where the guy using the most sad smilies this week.

Yeah, this seems like a brilliant way to get acquired by google.

Hopefully they'll use a well-known bot name that can be easily kickbanned...

There was lots of similar complaining when Google started indexing usenet, the complaining will go away and it will be a very useful service soon enough.

Note on other past complaints: Facebook is open to all colleges; Facebook is open to all people; Facebook has news feed; Twitter encourages narcissism...

I just searched for my handle and I can see all my previous conversations. This is nuts.. and really cool. By looking at the tag cloud on the homepage irseek.com, it's nice to see that the unix world is strongly represented!

Agreed. Although tagclouds still need to die :)

ha, I just used it to remember my username... :)

does this mean there will be an equivalent of robots.txt for IRC chat rooms?

Something similar has already happened with Bottler/Blotter XDCC scripts ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottler_(IRC_client) ).

Bottler authors wanted channels to "opt out" by putting strings in the topic, but most channels instead implemented scripts that detect and kickban Bottlers.

it was easier for botler since it send requests to all users of the channel. Detecting bits that simply sit there and monitor all data might be harder. Although this might be a violation of the TOS on some networks.

I'm assuming; people have been using IRC bots for years.

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