#puppylinux irc chat

[mrfricks]

It seems there's been some upheaval on irc.freenode.net https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628 and this has resulted with the #puppylinux channel being taken over, shutdown and redirecting to ##puppylinux.

there has been a mass migration of channels & staff from freenode over to irc.libera.chat including #ubuntu & arch due to the above situation.

some irc #puppylinux regulars (aloo_shuu, PCplague, qkall, metamorphosis) have claimed #puppylinux on irc.libera.chat just so that it isn't taken over by bots, trolls and people unrelated to puppy. All of them agree with my suggestion that the channel should be owned by head of puppylinux/woofce which at this present time is @01micko.

the old channel was initially run by avid puppy users who eventually disappeared over time handing over the channel to none puppy users and trolls and it would be a shame for this to happen again in the future. having puppylinux/woofce as the owner means this wouldn't happen again.

what are your thoughts?

[Butterfly]

If everyone liked how Freenode functioned in the former past, the volunteers who brought that joy and useful goodness went to Libera.....

What you said about the old channel, well, that explains that! I accidentally logged on a few months ago while playing with Bionic Puppy during a hardware failure. The channel users weren't nice, were oddly, verbally aggressive. I've had no inclination to go back and be treated the same. I'm THRILLED it was not you all!! :partying_face:

I spent a part of yesterday trying to gather the #TRUTH about what happened to Freenode. Something's just not right. Someone who allegedly did NOT have the rights to do so sold Freenode to a stranger. The new "owner" now SUDDENLY wants to invasively invade all the channels after having been silent for several years. WHY NOW?

That person DOES now own Freenode purely because former Freenode folks' lawyers told them they couldn't afford the fight against the millionaire who overtook Freenode. What bothers me most at this second is that he has been out of the picture and now suddenly wants to do that invasion just as politics are really starting to heat up in the US.

[01micko]

I logged into irc.libera.chat using irrsi to sus it out. Seems legit, a few familiar nicks there.

I've no idea @mrfricks what to do to secure that chatroom. I left a message there which hopefully someone can read in the logs and contact me via either my website or diaspora*

@Butterfly , any suggestions?

Cheers to you both :smiley_cat:

[01micko]

I've also rebuilt my irssi-shell script to connect to libera and will be releasing another alpha of the slacko64-8.x series very soon.

[dimkr]

How about making defaultchat (or whatever it was) open https://web.libera.chat/ (with #puppylinux as the channel) in the default browser?

[01micko]

How about making defaultchat (or whatever it was) open https://web.libera.chat/ (with #puppylinux as the channel) in the default browser?

Yeah sure, if no chat client installed. Make that the default in /usr/local/bin/defaultchat and apinstall.sh in a package can easily overwrite..

[f0xpup]

@01micko To register the channel, you find info on libera.chat under Channel Namespaces. What's apt for #puppylinux, I reckon, is halfway that page: "How to register as a project"

A remark: I do not think you should link the irc chat channel for Puppy to woofCE on github (explicitly) as @mrfricks suggested. Who knows what may happen to woofCE and/or github in time?

[qkall]

Hey @01micko - I got your pm. and a message to come here... I have the channel secure but yes, looking to give it out to the staff. I'm just wanted to hold it until someone stepped up to - like mrfricks said - to prevent abuse use of the channel. I'm sorry if this complicated things... but yes, if we could link up at some point I'll freely hand it over :)

I'm more quickly available via @qkall:matrix.org but I'll try to stay logged on my phone today.

[qkall]

What you said about the old channel, well, that explains that! I accidentally logged on a few months ago while playing with Bionic Puppy during a hardware failure. The channel users weren't nice, were oddly, verbally aggressive. I've had no inclination to go back and be treated the same. I'm THRILLED it was not you all!!

This my only request... we don't allow this to happen again due to lack of adequate moderation (talking numbers not quality).

[PCplague]

About f0xpup remark instead of pointing directly to libera.chat can it point to irc.puppylinux.com then irc.puppylinux.com can point to libera.chat ?

[01micko]

Hey @01micko - I got your pm. and a message to come here... I have the channel secure but yes, looking to give it out to the staff. I'm just wanted to hold it until someone stepped up to - like mrfricks said - to prevent abuse use of the channel. I'm sorry if this complicated things... but yes, if we could link up at some point I'll freely hand it over :)

I'm more quickly available via @qkall:matrix.org but I'll try to stay logged on my phone today.

I'm registered at matrix and sent you a PM

[01micko]

About f0xpup remark instead of pointing directly to libera.chat can it point to irc.puppylinux.com then irc.puppylinux.com can point to libera.chat ?

rockedge, forum coordinator owns the 'puppylinux.com' domain now. Not sure if you can set it up with a simple html redirect?

[ikonia]

having put some thought into this and drawing on experience from other IRC communities I'd suggest the following actions to protect the channel from future disruption and risk in the future

Setup a PuppyLinux IRC council - consisting of 5 members (more or less acceptable - just starting point for discussion) This should consist of 3 IRC operators + 2 User / Community representatives

Draw up a list of channel guidelines (the channel is small enough not to need rules) - basic policies such as is off topic discussion allowed native channel language is bad language acceptable etc etc

These need to then be written down and posted on the puppylinux wiki / forum and linked to in the channel topic so that everyone knows what's acceptable and what's not and the guidlines of how to engage with the channel etc.

A new IRC account setup called 'puppyIRC' or something along those lines.

This is granted founder status of the channel and linked to an acceptable email address that is a 'break glass' type account and never used apart from in a state of emergency (unlikely)

Operators are granted appropriate access rights to fully administrate the channel without the need for the break glass account - this will mean low overhead and self maintenance, eg if people join / leave, changing channel settings if a spam bot attack happens

A basic set of principals is then applied in which the Puppy IRC council control the actions

tier 1 - basic day to day policy changes, for example, allowing offtopic discussion when it was not allowed before

• the council discussion and vote with a majority 3 of 5 to implement the changes tier 2 - large scale disruptive change such as changing the IRC server location

• the council discuss and vote but must be unanimous

• this seems a bit of hard work to setup (it's not) but once it's in place it will be low maintenance and give everyone a voice and distribute control

In the background - complete the namespace registration with the contacts being some council members and some non-council operators, this will mean in the event of any rouge individual the namespace account that is not on the council and/or the break glass account can be used to restore any changes

In the background a new DNS record setup from the puppylinux.com domain "irc.puppylinux.com" which is a CNAME for irc.libera.chat

Future puppy releases point their IRC clients at this irc.puppylinux.com URL

In the event of a network change again (unlikely) the DNS record change is all that is needed to ensure everyone has minimal distruption (which again would be checks and balances ans the IRC council would need to agree and the puppylinux.com domain owner would need to make the DNS record change).

this has worked well for many large IRC communities for many years, so stripping it back to basics and distributing control and creating peer checking and break glass process will make the channel self administrating with low overhead while having safety nets to prevent miss-use.

Comment welcome

[PCplague]

I agree 100% but don't want to be part of it (don´t want to be op)

[01micko]

@ikonia sounds like a reasonable plan.

Who, should be IRC ops? (moderators in forum talk?)

I can stick my hand up as a community rep.. what about you @mrfricks , @dimkr ?

I rarely visit #puppylinux, usually to test chat client configurations in packages I build. Having the CNAME redirect certainly simplifies that, and I can take care of it because I do have access to the account.

Best place for rules and guidelines would be an added page to the main home page, even a menu item at the top for chat in the navbar. This is editable by anyone (conditionally upon pull request) as it is hosted at GitHub.

Thanks

[ikonia]

I'd probably suggest two levels of operator, a small group with 'full' access who understand how the IRC components work and a smaller group with operator access (eg: mute users, etc) so that they don't need to understand the full IRC component but just need to be able to moderate the channel.

I'd suggest the community members are active community members maybe a mix of people who've been around a long time so can add the historic value and someone not been around as long to represent fresh views (eg great suggestion on the matrix bridge)

My hope is that if the proposal is generally acceptable by the mass, maybe one or two online sessions with the channel as whole to get a feeling of what people want / don't want, then form the council and let them tidy it up into a set of guidelines and as you say then write it up.

Once the background tasks are complete (the name space registration which the council can decide on which non-council members they are happy being group contacts for the name space) and the break glass account is setup, update the main home page, update the topic and it's 'live' as a process

I've got templates and examples from other communities which could be a good starting point for the discussion, it's just more about getting people on board with the idea and concept.

[01micko]

it's just more about getting people on board with the idea and concept.

That's the real key.

[dimkr]

I can stick my hand up as a community rep.. what about you @mrfricks , @dimkr ?

I prefer to be nothing but a regular user :)

[01micko]

Me too until @mavrothal made me an owner of this repo! :scream:

[ikonia]

another step which would be good is to make a puppy IRC council repo on git hub so that decisions are documented and you can see approvals with commits.

[J-Rey]

I was the remaining co-founder (until I let my nick expire) & can help get the official channel back if we want to since would require group registration now & can easily prove my involvement. Not sure its worth it though since the unofficial channel seems good enough and should point to the official IRC wiki page which has the policies outlined there and could easily be updated to instruct how to use a new IRC server like Libera what with how things have went down.

I do like the CNAME idea so its no longer hardcoded though.

[alooshu]

1) This is not a woof-ce issue, 2) it is wrong that I had agreed to anything. Correct is, I wasn't even asked my opinion prior to the link of this issue circulating, 3) proposed solution: solving the problem at its root, reducing the distance between community managers, devs, and the end user, getting involved in the day-to-day business of puppy's IRC side, learning about the character of both the newcomers' questions, and the disruptions that are making attending them hard, first hand, that is, watching actively for a number of months instead of taking my or anybody else's potentially biased opinion on good faith

[PCplague]

In IRC freenode channel ##puppylinux loot has changed the topic to: "You have found the back-up chat room for PuppyLinux on freenode.net. Go to https://wikka.puppylinux.com/ChatRoom for the latest happenings.", but this page has nothing about the latest happenings. I asked him for a contact and he gave me his email, he also asked to "keep it simple" so I won't put it in public (here or IRC). Now what can I do? I think the wikka page should be updated and in what shall we say to loot.

[J-Rey]

I outright asked for the topic to be changed to include the wiki page since it has the instructions on how to manually connect as well as referencing the rules/guidelines. I thought any of us can update wiki pages but it seems the registration is disabled so I'll update it as needed unless someone else wants to.

This GitHub issue is about possibly changing woof-CE to point to a different official chat, preferably with an officially controlled CNAME but could be directly to Libera Chat or even left at Freenode. How the channels are run & operated is off-topic and better discussed in the forum like most major decisions have been. (Although, now I'm stuck waiting on an e-mail to register at the forum so maybe not)

[J-Rey]

Found the e-mail in spam folder so here's my latest post on the forum

[qkall]

So I just got a pm that Freenode wiped all their channels... I checked and #puppylinux is back up but unsecured and all that. So I think if y'all re-register the namespace you can get it back! This is kinda good news.

I wouldn't mind bridging the channels to appease everyone but... I guess it depends on the consensus.

[crabbedhaloablution]

Freenode has imploded and there are currently at least 3 disjoint instances: https://www.devever.net/%7Ehl/freenode_suicide

[mrfricks]

@ikonia sounds like a reasonable plan.

Who, should be IRC ops? (moderators in forum talk?)

I can stick my hand up as a community rep.. what about you @mrfricks , @dimkr ?

I rarely visit #puppylinux, usually to test chat client configurations in packages I build. Having the CNAME redirect certainly simplifies that, and I can take care of it because I do have access to the account.

Best place for rules and guidelines would be an added page to the main home page, even a menu item at the top for chat in the navbar. This is editable by anyone (conditionally upon pull request) as it is hosted at GitHub.

Thanks

would the CNAME redirect work seamlessly in the chat client? as if so this is brilliant future proof solution and means puppylinux will always own the chat.

i'm happy to be a community rep as i still pop on fairly regularly.

[crabbedhaloablution]

would the CNAME redirect work seamlessly in the chat client? as if so this is brilliant future proof solution and means puppylinux will always own the chat.

IIUC, instructing users to connect to a CNAME will not work with TLS, since the certificate domain is different from the domain being connected to. Some chat clients will allow you to ignore the warning, but that is arguably not a thing we want to accustom users to do.

[mrfricks]

would the CNAME redirect work seamlessly in the chat client? as if so this is brilliant future proof solution and means puppylinux will always own the chat.

IIUC, instructing users to connect to a CNAME will not work with TLS, since the certificate domain is different from the domain being connected to. Some chat clients will allow you to ignore the warning, but that is arguably not a thing we want to accustom users to do.

hi @crabbedhaloablution it might have been mentioned earlier in this thread, but a hexchat/pidgin wrapper script could get the info from puppylinux and write to the .conf file before starting

[ikonia]

I'll give this a last little bump.

the cname would not cause problems with SSL/Sasl - its just an IP look up - not a domain, the server will respond with forward/verse dns for the certificate to use.

seems like now is the time to put this stuff in place before everyone gets comfortable and it all gets forgot about.

[ikonia]

time's settled now - is this something we want to implement / partially implement (at least he cname part ?) or just close the issue leave everything as is, want to give this a last bump to see if there is any interest in tidying up / putting in the protection steps before any more releases go out

[01micko]

You'll have to contact 'rockedge' on the forum for the CNAME solution. He administers it and has domain ownership.

I can fix the puppylinux.com.

[PCplague]

https://forum.puppylinux.com/ gives "This Account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information."

[PCplague]

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/770333/notice-for-all-puppy-linux-users-main-forum-down-due-to-ddos/

[peabee]

The forum is back.........due to the efforts of Rockedge

IMPORTANT! This Forum was hit by a deliberate DDOS attack which forced the server host provider to suspend and throw us and the forum's software out. At this time we are migrating to a new host provider.