From: gjm5@po.CWRU.Edu (Gregory J. Meyers)
Newsgroups: alt.irc
Subject: Re: Waxing nostalgic without much of a point.  Was: Re: Why people care so strongly about IRC (sorry, a bit long)
Date: 12 Dec 1992 08:21:57 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: gjm5@po.CWRU.Edu (Lord Maximilien of Myragorthia)
NNTP-Posting-Host: thor.ins.cwru.edu


In a previous article, mattm@digex.com (Matt Mosley) says:
>In article <1g842vINNjnm@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> gjm5@po.CWRU.Edu (Gregory J. Meyers) writes:
[my stuff deleted]
>Oh, wonderful - now you're suggesting that an automated client handle
>things that require human intervention.  This sound really great for the
>IRC network.

     Maybe keeping the system optimized doesn't necessarily require human
intervention.  Everyone on alt.irc keeps saying how the IRC is an anarchy,
and how the operators can't agree on what should be connected to what--
especially in the ol' U.S. of A.  Rather than just asking everyone to come
to an agreement, we ought to pick someone to make a final decision.  And
since we're probably never going to choose a single person to do this, a bot
would be the logical alternative.  A bot would, in fact, be the only com-
pletely unbiased judge of things.
     The next problem is, of course, who should write it.  Well, let everyone
who wants to give it a try, and their resulting suggestions can be tried out
and compared.  Whichever produces the best performance (Surely there is some
way this can be measured in an absolute fashion, e.g. average reaction time
for all servers?) would then be tested further--still only making suggestions
to operators of course--and only THEN, if it had already proved its worth,
might it be given the ability to make the changes itself.  It could be moni-
tored thereafter to make sure nothing went wrong; I'm certain all operators
would be scrutinizing it quite carefully.  The whole thing could be dropped
at any time.

>>     I wouldn't call kicking bots a service; more of a challenge.
[more of my stuff deleted]
>I'm really disgusted with this kind of logic.  Can't you realize that some
>of us are _paying_ for network links, and you're sending hundreds of useless
>mode/kick commands over the net?  Don't you know that they are propogated
>_everywhere_?  Obviously you've never been a system administrator, and
>don't understand the damage this can really do.

     This has been brought up many times.  But I think eliminating bots is
not the answer.  After all, mode wars and kick wars can proceed without
unmanned clients.  Perhaps a better way to organize IRC would prevent those
kick wars and mode wars being sent to servers that do not need this infor-
mation anyway.  Does anyone out there have an idea about how this could be
done?
     I know that each server has to have its own copy of all the channel-
mode data for every channel.  This makes processing of each individual user
go much more quickly; if there were only one master server with this info,
things would run much too slow.  The positive effect of such an arrangement
would be the elimination of server disjunctions completely.  What about some
sort of compromise, an in-between distributed sort of arrangement?  What
about some other setup completely, having to do with whether anyone from a
given server is on the channel or not?  Anyone have any ideas?

>You're forgetting one very important point.  IRC always has been and always
>will be an __Anarchy__.  You figure out the rest...

     This has also been mentioned, and not everyone agrees.  It seems to be
worse in the U.S.  At any rate, it's one of those things that needs to be
addressed, and not just dismissed.  Obviously I don't know enough about
the political side of IRC to make many intelligent suggestions, but there are
others on this board who clearly do, and I'd like to encourage them to speak
up if they haven't already.  It's a matter that should be discussed.  If we
talk about it rationally we might come to some sort of agreement.
>
>-- 
>Matt Mosley                    <>      "Think for yourself, and feel the
>Digital Express Group          <>       walls..  become sand beneath your
>mattm@digex.com                        <>       feet."   -  Queensryche

                                             Lord_Max
                                             Greg Meyers
                                             meyers@alpha.ces.cwru.edu
Newsgroups: alt.irc