Hello everyone,
During the recent holiday weekend some of our channels experienced some IRC
trolling/vandalism. In particular the meetbot was used to start meetings titled
'maintenance' which updated the channel topic to 'maintenance'. The individual
or bot doing this then used this as the pretense for claiming the channel was
to undergo maintenance and everyone should leave. This is one of the risks of
using public communications channels, anyone can show up and abuse them.
In an effort to make it more clear as to what is trolling and what isn't, here
are the bots we currently operate:
- Meetbot ("openstack") to handle IRC meetings and log channels on
eavesdrop.openstack.org
- Statusbot ("openstackstatus") to notify channels about service outages and
update topic accordingly
- Gerritbot ("openstackgerrit") to notify channels about code review updates
Should the Infra team need to notify of pending maintenance work, that
notification will come via the statusbot and not the meetbot. The number of
individuals that can set topics via statusbot is limited to a small number of
IRC operators.
If you have any questions you can reach out either in the #openstack-infra
channel or to any channel operator directly and ask them. To get a list of
channel operators run `/msg chanserv access #channel-name list`. Finally any
user can end a meeting that meetbot started after one hour (by issuing a
#endmeeting command). So you should feel free to clean those up yourself if you
are able.
If the Freenode staff needs to perform maintenance or otherwise make
announcements, they tend to send special messages directly to clients so you
will see messages from them in your IRC client's status channel. Should you
have any questions for Freenode you can find freenode operators in the
#freenode channel.
As a final note the infra team has an approved spec for improving our IRC bot
tooling, http://specs.openstack.org/openstack-infra/infra-specs/specs/irc.html.
Implementing this spec is going to be a prerequisite for implementing smarter
automated responses to problems like this and it needs volunteers. If you think
this might be interesting to you definitely reach out.
Thank you for your patience,
Clark
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