Aloha!
I'm back from vacation, and have been reviewing how the IRC bots in #squeak and #etoys performed. Also, now that we've had a chance to observe them for a few weeks, I'd like to formally poll the community to confirm or reject the current setup. I have heard mostly positive feedback but some folks think the noise outweighs the benefit. Just to be clear, this mail is about announcements on IRC, not the commit announcements on the mail list.
Recap and some observations:
- four bots are running in #squeak (squeaksourcebot, squeaktrunkbot, squeakbugsbot, squeakplanetbot) and two in #etoys (etoysupdatesbot, etoystrackerbot). The last two are quiet and uncontroversial so I'll ignore those.
- the bots ran pretty well unattended. I asked several squeakers to keep an eye on them but no maintenance was needed. Mean time between failures (unexpected terminations due to loss of irc connection) was about one bot-day. Cron restarted downed bots periodically so outages hopefully weren't too noticeable. As an extra safeguard all bots were restarted nightly; this is normally not done.
- the bots are generic rss/atom feed announcers, emitting at least one irc message per new feed item. I can tweak them quite a bit, but I'd prefer not to maintain special-purpose #squeak-specific bots.
- currently, each bot can announce up to 5 new items every 15 minutes. The downside of reducing the max announce rate is increased time lag when announcing bursts of activity.
- also, a single item with an unusually long squeaksource commit description gets split up into multiple irc messages. (This is rare but I'll probably change this.)
- most noise comes from the commit bots: squeaktrunkbot and especially squeaksourcebot. squeakbugsbot once or twice announced 20ish items, presumably due to a genuine burst of bug-updating activity.
- when reviewing irc logs, bot noise sometimes looks overwhelming only because there wasn't much human discussion going on. Look at the timestamps or participate in the channel in real time to get a better feel for it.
- commit activity comes in waves, as you'd expect. Some days are quiet. We had a couple of very heavy days while I was away, probably due to ESUG. Commit activity will probably increase over time.
- I want the bots to reflect community consensus, so I'm posting here on the mail list and would like to hear from as many as possible. I think opinions from the regular #squeak users should probably carry more weight than the rest.
Poll:
My question is: What should be done with the bots currently announcing in the #squeak IRC channel ?
a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.
b. Move them all to back to #squeak-in-depth or elsewhere, they are damaging #squeak!
c. Move the noisy commit bots to a separate channel, keep others where they are.
d. I have a better idea: ...
Please respond (any way you like) to this mail list thread to help me know what to do. Please do respond even if you are happy with the status quo, so we get an accurate picture.
Thanks! -Simon