python admin abuse complaint

[Stephen Thorne]

On Feb 5, 9:02 am, Steve Holden <st... at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> > • The list of ban'd person's names, the reason for banning, and the
> > name of admin who ban'd them, should be public. (irc already provides
> > means for this that allows admins to annotate in the ban list.) In
> > particular, if you are going to ban someone by ip address, make sure
> > the person's handle (or preferably real life name), be listed together
> > with it. (again, this needs not elaborate. A single sentence will do,
> > e.g. “repeatedly asking same question”, “continously raising
> > controversial issues”, “refused to use paste bin when requested” will
> > do. Again, be as precise in description as possible. For example,
> > “ban'd for trolling”, “annoying others”, are not a meaningful reason.)
>
> This is perhaps a little formal for something that (as far as I know)
> happens less than once a month. I am reluctant to start up any kind of
> bureaucracy around bannings unless they become too frequent (in which
> case your suggestions above seem reasonable).

The current banlist lists 258 names. According to my logs there have
been 95 masks added to this list and 44 removals since October. This
is approximately 23 a month, or 3 every 4 days. 11 ops were active in
this action during this period.

For reference, this is the 4th largest IRC channel on freenode
according to http://searchirc.com/search.php?SCHANS=1&SSORT=SIZE&N=freenode
and the other large channels weigh in with 298 (gentoo), 9
(archlinux), 14 (##C++), 280 (#ubuntu), 109 (#debian).

We are hardly exceptional in the size of our list of people we have
excluded from the IRC community.

On discussion with #archlinux it seems that the reason archlinux has
so few on their list is because they use chanserv's AKICK feature,
which means the name isn't kept in the IRC client accessable banlist,
and is only put there temporarily when the excluded user returns by
chanserv.

Stephen.