Hello everyone,
Yesterday we moved the Haiku IRC channels to a new server. Here is a summary of
what happened and why we did it.
For a very long time we had used Freenode to host our IRC channels. It was a
well established server hosting many
open source projects, and was the logical place to put our channels when we
created them.
There were some rumors for a while that things were not going smoothly at
Freenode, with draft of resignation
letters from various staff members circulating. At that point we decided to
wait a bit and see how things turn
out. However, yesterday multiple things were made official. First of all,
Freenode is now owned by a for-profit
company. It is unclear how this happened since historically Freenode is an IRC
network with no backing legal
entity. Regardless, it happened. The existing staff is not happy with that
situation and most of them resigned
and left to create a new IRC network: https://libera.chat.
It is unclear how things will go both for Freenode (which is, for now, left
essentially without admins) and for
the new libera.chat network (which was apparently launched a bit in a hurry).
In this situation, the future for
both of these networks seem rather incertain, and it was not clear if we could
reliably host our services there.
Apparently both networks are also under spam attacks from bots, for exampel
telling people that channels are
migrated to the other network (hopefully not run by the owner of the networks,
but someone trying to make an
already pretty bad situation even worse). After a short discussion with other
IRC moderators (kallisti5 and
waddlesplash who were online at the time of the announcement), we have decided
that it was better to move our
channels to the OFTC network. OFTC is another well established IRC network
hosting channels for various
opensource projects. It is run by the non-profit SPI (https://www.spi-inc.org),
which is likely to provide a
better governance model and avoid such incidents in the future. OFTC was also
chosen over libera.chat because
it already had a Matrix gateway, making it easy for people connecting to the
channel over Matrix to join there.
This change was made to guarantee continuity of service as best as we can.
The following actions have been taken:
- Registered the IRC channels at OFTC
- Updated the Haiku website with the new addresses
- Changed the default configuration of Vision to join there instead of freenode
- Moved the commit log bots to the new channels
- Moved the BeShare gateway to the new channel
- Set up access for existing moderators to the new channel (for the ones that
were online at the time, you can
ask one of the channel operators to get your access back if you were an
operator previously)
We are currently investigating solutions for a logging bot so that people can
follow discussions on the channel.
This should be set up in the next few days.
Please configure your IRC clients to join the new channel. The old one remains
somewhat operational for now,
but it would be nice to not split the community in two. At the moment the old
channel only allows authenticated
people to talk (this provides some protection against spam bots). Later on we
will probably completely close it
down with a message telling users to go to the new one.
Sorry for the inconvenience, see you on the new channel!
--
Adrien / PulkoMandy
