[oslo][all] Ending courtesy pings
Hi, We discussed this some in the Oslo meeting yesterday[0], and I wanted to send a followup because there wasn't universal support for it. One of the outcomes of the PTL tips and tricks session in Denver was that courtesy pings like we use in the Oslo meeting are considered bad IRC etiquette. The recommendation was for interested parties to set up custom highlights on the "#startmeeting oslo" (or whichever meeting) command. Also, there is an ics file available on eavesdrop[1] that can be used to import the meeting to your calendaring app of choice. I should note that I don't seem to be able to configure notifications on the imported calendar entry in Google calendar though, so I'm not sure how useful this is as a reminder. A couple of concerns were raised yesterday. One was that people didn't know how to configure their IRC client to do this. Once you do configure it, there's a testing problem in that you don't get notified of your own messages, so you basically have to wait for the next meeting and hope you got it right. Or pull someone into a private channel and have them send a startmeeting command, which is a hassle. It isn't terribly complicated, but if it isn't tested then it's assumed broken. :-) The other concern was that this process would have to be done any time someone changes IRC clients, whereas the ping list was a central thing that always applies no matter where you're connecting from. Anyway, I said I would send an email out for further public discussion, and this is it. I'm interested to hear people's thoughts. Thanks. -Ben 0: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/oslo/2019/oslo.2019-05-13-15.00.log.... 1: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/#Oslo_Team_Meeting
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 1:04 PM Ben Nemec <openstack@nemebean.com> wrote:
Hi,
We discussed this some in the Oslo meeting yesterday[0], and I wanted to send a followup because there wasn't universal support for it.
One of the outcomes of the PTL tips and tricks session in Denver was that courtesy pings like we use in the Oslo meeting are considered bad IRC etiquette. The recommendation was for interested parties to set up custom highlights on the "#startmeeting oslo" (or whichever meeting) command. Also, there is an ics file available on eavesdrop[1] that can be used to import the meeting to your calendaring app of choice. I should note that I don't seem to be able to configure notifications on the imported calendar entry in Google calendar though, so I'm not sure how useful this is as a reminder.
A couple of concerns were raised yesterday. One was that people didn't know how to configure their IRC client to do this. Once you do configure it, there's a testing problem in that you don't get notified of your own messages, so you basically have to wait for the next meeting and hope you got it right. Or pull someone into a private channel and have them send a startmeeting command, which is a hassle. It isn't terribly complicated, but if it isn't tested then it's assumed broken. :-)
The other concern was that this process would have to be done any time someone changes IRC clients, whereas the ping list was a central thing that always applies no matter where you're connecting from.
Anyway, I said I would send an email out for further public discussion, and this is it. I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.
I'd argue that as long as people opt in to a courtesy ping, and have a clear way to opt out, then the courtesy ping is not bad etiquette. It would be great if folks managed their own meeting reminders, but if they appreciate a ping at the start of the meeting, I see no reason not to do that. // jim
Thanks.
-Ben
0:
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/oslo/2019/oslo.2019-05-13-15.00.log.... 1: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/#Oslo_Team_Meeting
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 1:04 PM Ben Nemec <openstack@nemebean.com> wrote:
Hi,
We discussed this some in the Oslo meeting yesterday[0], and I wanted to send a followup because there wasn't universal support for it.
One of the outcomes of the PTL tips and tricks session in Denver was that courtesy pings like we use in the Oslo meeting are considered bad IRC etiquette. The recommendation was for interested parties to set up custom highlights on the "#startmeeting oslo" (or whichever meeting) command. Also, there is an ics file available on eavesdrop[1] that can be used to import the meeting to your calendaring app of choice. I should note that I don't seem to be able to configure notifications on the imported calendar entry in Google calendar though, so I'm not sure how useful this is as a reminder.
A couple of concerns were raised yesterday. One was that people didn't know how to configure their IRC client to do this. Once you do configure it, there's a testing problem in that you don't get notified of your own messages, so you basically have to wait for the next meeting and hope you got it right. Or pull someone into a private channel and have them send a startmeeting command, which is a hassle. It isn't terribly complicated, but if it isn't tested then it's assumed broken. :-)
The other concern was that this process would have to be done any time someone changes IRC clients, whereas the ping list was a central thing that always applies no matter where you're connecting from.
Anyway, I said I would send an email out for further public discussion, and this is it. I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.
I'd argue that as long as people opt in to a courtesy ping, and have a clear way to opt out, then the courtesy ping is not bad etiquette.
It would be great if folks managed their own meeting reminders, but if they appreciate a ping at the start of the meeting, I see no reason not to do that.
// jim
Thanks.
-Ben
0:
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/oslo/2019/oslo.2019-05-13-15.00.log.... 1: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/#Oslo_Team_Meeting
Keystone used to have a self-managed list (curated at the start of each cycle administratively so inactive folks weren't constantly pinged) for the courtesy pings. The list was located at the top of our weekly meeting agenda. With that said, we've also moved away from courtesy pings. With the ability to export the .ics of the calendars (for my personal calendar) this has become less of an issue. I support the general removal of courtesy
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 10:38 AM Jim Rollenhagen <jim@jimrollenhagen.com> wrote: pings simply for the reason of limiting the clutter in the channels. --Morgan
On 5/14/19 12:42 PM, Morgan Fainberg wrote:
(curated at the start of each cycle administratively so inactive folks weren't constantly pinged)
We discussed this some in the Cinder meeting today and I suggested maybe clearing the list each cycle and requiring people to re-subscribe. That way we don't end up with stale entries and people being pinged undesirably. It's a little tricky for me to clean up the list manually since I don't want to remove liaisons, but I'm not sure some of them actually attend the meeting anymore. Plus that might encourage people to set up client-side notifications so they don't have to mess with it every six months. If the ping list ends up empty (or not) then it's a pretty good indication of people's preferences.
On 2019-05-14 13:32:49 -0400 (-0400), Jim Rollenhagen wrote: [...]
I'd argue that as long as people opt in to a courtesy ping, and have a clear way to opt out, then the courtesy ping is not bad etiquette.
It would be great if folks managed their own meeting reminders, but if they appreciate a ping at the start of the meeting, I see no reason not to do that.
Yep, the main challenge is that spammers also like to randomly mention lists of nicks to trigger highlights in a particular channel before proceeding to paste in whatever nonsense with which they wish to regale us, so Freenode's policing mechanisms may mistake a lengthy "ping list" for such activity and insta-ban you. -- Jeremy Stanley
On 2019-05-14 11:58:03 -0500 (-0500), Ben Nemec wrote: [...]
The recommendation was for interested parties to set up custom highlights on the "#startmeeting oslo" (or whichever meeting) command. [...]
Cross-sections of our community have observed similar success with "group highlight" strings (infra-root, tc-members, zuul-maint and so on) where the folks who want to get notified as a group can opt to add these custom strings to their client configurations.
people didn't know how to configure their IRC client to do this.
For those using WeeChat, the invocation could be something like this in your core buffer: /set weechat.look.highlight_regex #startmeeting (oslo|tripleo) /save Or you could similarly set the corresponding line in the [look] section of your ~/.weechat/weechat.conf file and then /reload it: highlight_regex = "#startmeeting (oslo|tripleo)" Extend the (Python flavored) regex however makes sense. https://www.weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html#option_weechat...
Once you do configure it, there's a testing problem in that you don't get notified of your own messages, so you basically have to wait for the next meeting and hope you got it right. Or pull someone into a private channel and have them send a startmeeting command, which is a hassle. It isn't terribly complicated, but if it isn't tested then it's assumed broken. :-)
Or temporarily add one for a meeting you know is about to happen on some channel to make sure you have the correct configuration option and formatting, at least.
The other concern was that this process would have to be done any time someone changes IRC clients, whereas the ping list was a central thing that always applies no matter where you're connecting from. [...]
I may be an atypical IRC user, but this is far from the most complicated part of my configuration which would need to be migrated to a new client. Then again, I've only changed IRC clients roughly every 8 years (so I guess I'm due to move to a 5th one next year). -- Jeremy Stanley
On 5/14/19 2:46 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2019-05-14 11:58:03 -0500 (-0500), Ben Nemec wrote: [...]
The recommendation was for interested parties to set up custom highlights on the "#startmeeting oslo" (or whichever meeting) command. [...]
Cross-sections of our community have observed similar success with "group highlight" strings (infra-root, tc-members, zuul-maint and so on) where the folks who want to get notified as a group can opt to add these custom strings to their client configurations.
people didn't know how to configure their IRC client to do this.
For those using WeeChat, the invocation could be something like this in your core buffer:
/set weechat.look.highlight_regex #startmeeting (oslo|tripleo) /save
Or you could similarly set the corresponding line in the [look] section of your ~/.weechat/weechat.conf file and then /reload it:
highlight_regex = "#startmeeting (oslo|tripleo)"
Extend the (Python flavored) regex however makes sense.
https://www.weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html#option_weechat...
One other thing I forgot to mention was a suggestion that having dev docs for some of the common IRC clients would be helpful with this. It wasn't terribly hard for me to do in Quassel, but I've heard from IRC Cloud users that they weren't able to find a way to do this. I've never used it so I'm not much help.
Once you do configure it, there's a testing problem in that you don't get notified of your own messages, so you basically have to wait for the next meeting and hope you got it right. Or pull someone into a private channel and have them send a startmeeting command, which is a hassle. It isn't terribly complicated, but if it isn't tested then it's assumed broken. :-)
Or temporarily add one for a meeting you know is about to happen on some channel to make sure you have the correct configuration option and formatting, at least.
True, and this is what I ended up doing. :-)
The other concern was that this process would have to be done any time someone changes IRC clients, whereas the ping list was a central thing that always applies no matter where you're connecting from. [...]
I may be an atypical IRC user, but this is far from the most complicated part of my configuration which would need to be migrated to a new client. Then again, I've only changed IRC clients roughly every 8 years (so I guess I'm due to move to a 5th one next year).
Yeah, I can't say this is a huge issue for me personally, but it was mentioned in the meeting so I included it.
On 2019-05-15 13:47:03 -0500 (-0500), Ben Nemec wrote: [...]
One other thing I forgot to mention was a suggestion that having dev docs for some of the common IRC clients would be helpful with this. It wasn't terribly hard for me to do in Quassel, but I've heard from IRC Cloud users that they weren't able to find a way to do this. I've never used it so I'm not much help. [...]
Having a tips-n-tricks section in https://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/irc.html for things like this might make sense, if folks want to propose additions there. -- Jeremy Stanley
participants (4)
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Ben Nemec
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Jeremy Stanley
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Jim Rollenhagen
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Morgan Fainberg