wiki log of #dragonfly irc channel

[Justin C. Sherrill]

On Mon, March 5, 2007 8:16 am, Adrian Michael Nida wrote:
> <Snip/>
> : I'm guessing you're serious, so I'll mention why this is a risky idea.
> : IRC has chewing-gum authentication and it's almost trivial for a
> : malicious bot to fool a server into ignoring people by pretending to
> : be them, and this can be done in many points*. Basically, the entire
> : utility of the logging bot is broken because it allows virtually
> : unauthenticated modifications to its behavior. Not to mention the
> : confusion that arises if an entire participant in a conversation has
> : their messages removed.
> <Snip/>
>
> I agree here.  I'd be willing to perform some s/USERNAME/ANONYMOUS/g magic
> in the messages.  That way, the message would be preserved, but it can't
> be
> tracked back to a given user.

Here's different reasons for the logs:

1: Catchup for people who have been off IRC for 24-48 hours
2: An introduction for people who want to see what the general tone and
topic is in the channel
3: A historical log that keeps things people are interested in from a year
or two years ago.

Saving the last 2-3k lines of the log will work for purposes 1 and 2, and
enough people seem nervous about 3 that I would say maybe we should stick
to just holding recent dialogue.  I don't know of any scenario where
long-term history for IRC proved useful - mailing lists, yes, but not
something transitory like IRC conversations.