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- From the IRC perspective, we welcome the CoC -- it's nice to have a document to point people to which clearly articulates the sort of behaviour we want and the sort of environment we would like to maintain. A CoC is a great aspirational device and having the project support it sends a clear message. Let's not start making this into a massive bureaucratic nightmare for all of us though. We echo the concerns of Alexander Wirt on this. Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > For IRC it's a bit more difficult, because we do not long our IRC > channels by default (or at least I'm not aware we do), with the > exception of meetings run with the help of meetbot. That means that it > would be rather difficult for the moderators to point out to the > evidence on the basis of which they've banned someone. I can't help > wondering if the solution to this shouldn't just be radical, > i.e. publicly log our IRC channels. A less invasive solution is to just > ask moderators to publish log excerpts that they think justify the ban. IRC bans are already public in that the mode change is public to anyone on the channel at the time and anyone on the server can inspect the ban list for a public channel. I assume that the above is written with the developer channels in mind, but let me state that as an op in the project's public facing channels (#debian, #debian-offtopic) I would strongly object to having an increased workload put on the ops of those channels. The ops there are already stretched [1] -- having to deal with crap in #debian isn't the most fun way of spending your time in the first place and adding a layer of bureaucracy to the process is just going to suck the life out of people. Looking through logs for the second half of last year, I find that there were almost 400 bans placed in #debian (oftc + freenode) and that all but a handful of them were made by 3 hard-working volunteers. Who is getting banned? In rough order: * spammers who want to crapflood the channel with race hate * other link spammers/scammers/jibberish bots * people who want support for windows, redhat, ubuntu, mint ... and refuse to actually ask in the right place where there is a dedicated channel with people to answer their questions * people with broken irc clients repeatedly joining then parting * people who want to rant about something offtopic, monopolise the channel by doing so and thus prevent anyone else from getting the support they are seeking. [2] How long are they banned? Usually a few minutes is enough to be able to talk to someone in private, to get them to cool down and be constructive again. If someone wants to set up some sort of paperwork scheme to track that sort of information, they are are welcome to do so -- just don't expect anyone to use it. They are welcome to idle in the channel and do the paperwork themselves if they feel it is worthwhile. [3] This is not to say that we want to do all this in secret and have no transparency. We frequently discuss bans in our ops channel with other ops, with network staff/opers and with people affected by them. More commonly, the op in question discusses bans directly with the person in question in a private message though as that's much more likely to de-escalate the situation. All ops are able to remove bans they disagree with. Time and people are routinely identified as the most important things Debian lacks; let's make sure our effort is spent productively. Stuart (with input from other #debian ops) [1] before anyone suggests this, let me pre-emptively say that parachuting new people in as extra ops doesn't work. New faces don't have the trust of the regulars so they are ineffective ops. This has been tried before and I don't believe there is one single active op left in #debian who was parachuted in. [2] it won't surprise anyone that ranting about gnome 3 or init systems is common enough... But #debian is a *support* channel; people there can only answer questions and help people report bugs where necessary. Anything beyond that becomes destructive to the channel and demoralising to the people volunteering to help in there. [3] yes, this is also an echo of other conversations we have had in the project recently -- if someone thinks something is important, they should step and do the work not require everyone else to bend to their wishes. - -- Stuart Prescott http://www.nanonanonano.net/ [email protected] Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/ [email protected] GPG fingerprint BE65 FD1E F4EA 08F3 23D4 3C6D 9FE8 B8CD 71C5 D1A8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlL+GSEACgkQn+i4zXHF0aj0SACgz6NZzqwcnYoVjX1tL4KKUcKI MFQAni+911tKlnIsGHWwThbBsHtMSchg =KWae -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
