On 2021-05-21 19:29:46 +0000 (+0000), Jeremy Stanley wrote: [...]
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. [...]
We've now heard back from three of the five confirmed Open Infrastructure Projects (Kata, Zuul and OpenStack). This seems like a sufficient majority to determine that we should relocate our IRC service bots from Freenode to OFTC according to our long-standing evacuation plan. The Zuul contributors indicated a preference for moving as soon as possible, and OpenStack's leadership suggested this weekend; it's a holiday weekend for many of their contributors and their channels won't be as heavily used during that time anyway, so gaps in logged discussions and notifications are more easily tolerated. This also gives us a few more days to polish up the code and config changes for our bots in order to ensure a reasonably smooth transition. For a majority of users, this move should be as simple as replacing "chat.freenode.net" with "irc.oftc.net" in their client settings, but read on for relevant caveats. Nick registration won't be strictly required to join any channels we're managing on OFTC, at least not initially (and hopefully never unless spammers become a significant problem for us there), however users are encouraged to go ahead and claim the nicks they want and register them with OFTC's NickServ sooner rather than later: https://www.oftc.net/Services/#register-your-account Do note that the SASL auth mechanism supported by Freenode is not available on OFTC, but you can still send an identify message to NickServ after connecting or set up certificate authentication for your connection instead. See the OFTC Services FAQ for details on these and other topics (like how to request control of an abandoned nick if the one you want was already taken by someone else but is apparently unused for some time): https://www.oftc.net/FAQ/Services/ There's also a marvellous write-up on the zuul-discuss mailing list about using the Element WebUI to connect via Matrix's OFTC bridge, for anyone who's interested in giving that a try instead of using a traditional client and/or "bouncer" solution: http://lists.zuul-ci.org/pipermail/zuul-discuss/2021-May/001613.html Please be aware that one of the tasks I'm personally planning for over the next few days is to scrape a copy of all the channel topics and apply them automatically to the channels we've pre-registered on OFTC, so at least for now please refrain from changing your channel topics to anything other than what you'll want them to appear a on the new network. Further, there have been numerous reports of Freenode staff taking over any channels which mention in their topics that they're moving to a different network, therefore it would help if some volunteers can stay connected to Freenode (most modern IRC clients are capable of connecting to multiple networks simultaneously) and joined to our more popular channels there to help direct stragglers to our new home. We'll have somewhat of a delay in bootstrapping channel-specific operators since we want to push those through code review (in order to avoid having to trust that people on a new network are really who they say they are), so if you need a channel topic updated or a problem user banned in the short term you'll need to reach out to the sysadmins in the #opendev channel on OFTC for assistance until we get the general admins and ops settled in. I'll be following up shortly with a reply to the threads I started on the project-specific discussion lists directing them to this announcement. Further updates will be limited to the service-discuss mailing list, so please respond here with any questions or comments. -- Jeremy Stanley