See also: Channel-IA | IRC
What follows is a discussion on Channel IA, trying to resolve a in-channel problem. (Please delete when no longer needed).
NOTICE: Before reading any further, please locate the /ignore feature in your IRC client.
If you’ve been hanging around #infoanarchy you might have noticed a new bot hanging around, surly (~surly@160.33.16.230) owned and operated by tangra (Lp1YHfW47i@128.32.112.233) which serves no useful purpose other than to shorten urls and feed them to the channel to solve a problem with the owner’s deficient irc setup.
Put aside the questionable utility of url shorteners, which are only useful for tricking people into going to goatse.cx and to cleanse urls of inferential information. General channel concensus has been to ditch the bot, since the tangra doesn’t want to give a reason for making a simple 1 WORD (PRIVMSG #infoanarchy :crap to PRIVMSG tangra :crap) change to this program which several people have even offered to do for him which is justified by “if you don’t like it, ignore it.”
If you agree with this point of view please sign your name below and maybe we can talk some sense into this guy.
Mutiny
while i do not share all of the strong feelings opined above, i do agree that having a url-shortener in a channel with a chump is probably redundant – if anything, it should be added to the existing chump if the people who benefit from url shortening are not able to visit the chump’s published links.–aml
Mutiny, you’re too kind. Also, tangra has recommended that his bot (and I would imply also himself) be kickbanned but nobody’s had the gall or stupidity to require the presence of +o in so long I can’t remember who’s got it.<3, dtm
I like to think the cooperative nature of #infoanarchy would prevent having to “do things the hardway” but you know… -Mutiny
Sure, I agree that tangra is being pigheaded about responding to criticism of surly. tangra, please?? -A-Young
Neither on technical nor emotional merits do I really mind that surly is around, however I find the echo of the urls in compressed form pointless for my own application. To what extent is the bot performing a service for others? Chump is going a great job. As a personal anectode, when I’m not around, and I want to be on top of things, I use chump to see what my buds are up to, and what interests them on the world wide intarweb. Therein lies the service, the function chump performs. Hell, if surly helps someone and offers meaning in their life, or helps them perform a task faster, then it’s great and it should stay.Perhaps when urls are chumped, tangra does not have an irc client that can afford him the ability to right click (extended click or whatever), forcing him to type other people’s contributions?Is that the service it is performing for you? If it is, then it should stay, as it’s performing a really nice service for you, hell I hate typing too 😉
So, really, we should ask ourselves what surly does for us.If it does nothing for the majority of the people it probably should privmsg to those that want surlies 🙂 If it helps people get to urls faster because of limitations they have with their client, or prevents panic attacks, then keep it spewin :)See you all online :)<3 –cryptomail
You could decide to /silence or /ignore the user/bot.
I have several problems with surly’s presence in #iA.
– It’s a bot, brought in there with no discussion at all. IRC isn’t a democracy, but it still depends on peaceful coexistence. Bringing blathering automatons in does not aid that at all.
– Its operator’s attitude is “You can go fuck yourself” with which I have a problem on general principles. Just because he’s too boneheaded to change clients doesn’t mean he has to force crap resulting from that on the rest of us. (For the record, my client of choice has the same wordwrap problem. Deal.)
– Apparently surly doesn’t just look for URLs at the beginning of a public message but at any spot in the text. This is a serious departure from previous policy, which already led to regular “FUCK YOU CHUMP” outbreaks when URLs were cut&pasted in a slightly careless manner and inadvertently ended up in the archives. chump has been a regular citizen of #iA for a long time and has become part of the modus operandi of the channel. surly adds next to nothing to previously existing functionality but instead detracts from it by making it impossible to post “private” URLs visible only to people in the channel at that time.
In conclusion, I think further cooperation will be impossible. Kill the damn thing already, and the horse it rode in on.
seti
> In conclusion, I think further cooperation will be impossible. Kill the damn thing already, and the horse it rode in on.
I agree. Thanks for the summary, all, I’ve kicked and banned surly.
If anyone would like to volunteer to hold ops in case this kind of thing happens again, drop me a mail to chris (at) void.printf.net. Thanks!
– Chris/choric.
< |matthew> I find it amusing how little we need an op.
< |matthew> An interesting observation on how well reasonable people can function together.
< |matthew> Won’t scale past ~100 though I think. Mostly because with a sample that size you get people like tangra.
< Emmett> Social pressure is enough to keep some systems stable. 🙂
< Emmett> The problem is when one of the participants either doesn’t care what people think of him/her or has a broken self-interest gene.
In this case, worse than merely broken self-interest but rather delighting in being despised. So now what about the horse it rode in on?
TakeDown.NET -> “Surly-Sucks”