On Mon, March 5, 2007 8:16 am, Adrian Michael Nida wrote: > <Snip/> > : I'm guessing you're serious, so I'll mention why this is a risky idea. > : IRC has chewing-gum authentication and it's almost trivial for a > : malicious bot to fool a server into ignoring people by pretending to > : be them, and this can be done in many points*. Basically, the entire > : utility of the logging bot is broken because it allows virtually > : unauthenticated modifications to its behavior. Not to mention the > : confusion that arises if an entire participant in a conversation has > : their messages removed. > <Snip/> > > I agree here. I'd be willing to perform some s/USERNAME/ANONYMOUS/g magic > in the messages. That way, the message would be preserved, but it can't > be > tracked back to a given user.
Here's different reasons for the logs: 1: Catchup for people who have been off IRC for 24-48 hours 2: An introduction for people who want to see what the general tone and topic is in the channel 3: A historical log that keeps things people are interested in from a year or two years ago. Saving the last 2-3k lines of the log will work for purposes 1 and 2, and enough people seem nervous about 3 that I would say maybe we should stick to just holding recent dialogue. I don't know of any scenario where long-term history for IRC proved useful - mailing lists, yes, but not something transitory like IRC conversations.
