Reevaluating choice of IRC network for our service bots

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Fri May 21 19:29:46 UTC 2021


As most people reading this are likely aware, there has been a
recent change in management for the Freenode IRC network. According
to public statements[0], the former staff have all left and the
network is in entirely new hands. Setting aside arguments about
which parties are in the wrong, further stability of the service we
provide is once again brought into question. We've seen evidence of
(much) lower levels of abuse mitigation over the past few days, with
a marked increase in registered accounts engaging in harassment over
extended periods of time across our channels without getting banned
from the network.

Due to disagreements between Freenode and other large IRC networks
and frequent related attacks against Freenode's servers, our
communities have experienced many extended periods of instability
there. In order to insure against a potential collapse of the
network, the OpenDev Collaboratory (and the OpenStack Project
Infrastructure before it) has for many years maintained a sort of
evacuation plan: For the multitude of channels overseen by OpenDev,
we also keep equivalent channel registrations on the Open and Free
Technology Community (OFTC) IRC network[1], and have communicated
with its operators on multiple occasions about their willingness and
ability to host our communities there should the need arise.

This week's events are, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. The
systems administrators for OpenDev have encouraged a move to OFTC on
multiple occasions, with the first formal proposal in March 2014[2].
In prior cases, the impact to the community for such a switch
outweighed the perceived benefits, but as we've heard growing
displeasure with Freenode from representatives of many of the
projects we serve, it is time once more to revisit whether we should
enact our longstanding evacuation plans.

Because the OpenDev Collaboratory exists to serve the projects it
hosts, input from project representatives and the Advisory Council
is critical in deciding major changes to services. If projects were
to move their channels to OFTC, the transition would not be
seamless. In particular, differences in authentication (no SASL
support, but you can authenticate your connection with a
certificate[3] if you don't want to identify to the NickServ after
connecting), permissions model (OFTC has coarse-grained RBAC
designed to reduce channel mismanagement), and NickServ and ChanServ
command syntax are among the challenges they're likely to face. The
same IRC nicks may also not be available in some cases, though due
to the generally smaller size of OFTC compared to Freenode this
hopefully won't come up for too many users. On a positive note, we
may be able to go back to not requiring nick registration just to
join channels, easing onboarding for newcomers.

If there is a consensus to move OpenDev's services to OFTC, or any
other IRC network for that matter, this will entail a bit of
development effort in order to accommodate the differences mentioned
above. Please do note, however, that moving to a network other than
OFTC would additionally mean we can't guarantee the availability of
the same IRC channel names either, so that needs to be weighed in
any decision. Some discussion[4][5][6] is already underway within
the OpenStack community as to what they'd prefer, but we haven't
heard much from other projects yet, so please do respond with your
thoughts on the matter.

[0] https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt
[1] https://www.oftc.net/
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-March/028783.html
[3] https://www.oftc.net/NickServ/CertFP/
[4] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2021-May/022468.html
[5] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2021-May/022539.html
[6] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-tc/%23openstack-tc.2021-05-20.log.html#t2021-05-20T15:33:18
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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