Open Stack

On 08/01/2018 06:22 AM, Luigi Toscano wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 August 2018 12:49:13 CEST Andrey Kurilin wrote:
>> Hey Ian and stackers!
>>
>> ср, 1 авг. 2018 г. в 8:45, Ian Wienand <iwienand at redhat.com>:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> It seems freenode is currently receiving a lot of unsolicited traffic
>>> across all channels.  The freenode team are aware [1] and doing their
>>> best.
>>>
>>> There are not really a lot of options.  We can set "+r" on channels
>>> which means only nickserv registered users can join channels.  We have
>>> traditionally avoided this, because it is yet one more barrier to
>>> communication when many are already unfamiliar with IRC access.
>>> However, having channels filled with irrelevant messages is also not
>>> very accessible.
>>>
>>> This is temporarily enabled in #openstack-infra for the time being, so
>>> we can co-ordinate without interruption.
>>>
>>> Thankfully AFAIK we have not needed an abuse policy on this before;
>>> but I guess we are the point we need some sort of coordinated
>>> response.
>>>
>>> I'd suggest to start, people with an interest in a channel can request
>>> +r from an IRC admin in #openstack-infra and we track it at [2] >>>
>>> Longer term ... suggestions welcome? :)
>>
>> Move to Slack? We can provide auto-sending to emails invitations for
>> joining by clicking the button on some page at openstack.org. It will not
>> add more berrier for new contributors and, at the same time, this way will
>> give some base filtering by emails at least.

slack is pretty unworkable for many reasons. The biggest of them is that 
it is not Open Source and we don't require OpenStack developers to use 
proprietary software to work on OpenStack.

The quality of slack that makes it effective at fighting spam is also 
the quality that makes it toxic as a community platform - the need for 
an invitation and being structured as silos.

Even if we were to decide to abandon our Open Source principles and 
leave behind those in our contributor base who believe that Free 
Software Needs Free Tools [1] - moving to slack would be a GIANT 
undertaking. As such, it would not be a very effective way to deal with 
this current spam storm.

> No, please no. If we need to move to another service, better go to a FLOSS
> one, like Matrix.org, or others.

We had some discussion in Vancouver about investigating the use of 
Matrix. We are a VERY large community, so we need to do scale and 
viability testing before it's even a worthy topic to raise with the TC 
and the community for consideration. If we did, we'd aim to run our own 
home server.

However, it's worth noting that matrix is not immune to spam. As an open 
federated protocol, it's a target as well. Running our own home server 
might give us some additional tools - but it might not, and we might be 
in the same scenario except now we're running another service and we had 
the pain of moving.

All that to say though, matrix seems like the best potential option 
available that meets the largest number of desires from our user base. 
Once we've checked it out for viability it might be worth discussing.

As above, any effort there is a pretty giant one that will require a 
large amount of planning, a pretty sizeable amount of technical 
preparation and would be disruptive at the least, I don't think that'll 
help us with the current spam storm though.

Monty

[1] https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html