Good morning all. Three days ago I wrote:
> 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: ...

Responses are summarised below. By my count the votes so far have been aaabbbbbc. This surprised a little; the 
yay-sayers have been much more visible to me.

In the d category Ian Trudel suggested waiting for inactivity and Randal and Bert agreed. That's a good feature idea and 
I've implemented it, thanks. All the squeak and etoys bots now wait for 5 minutes of silence before speaking.

Ken Brown suggested an archive to read in batch mode; that's http://planetmisc.squeak.org , or pointing your feed reader 
to the individual feeds.

Also long items now get truncated to fit a single irc message.

I'll wait a few days to see if these change anyone's mind, or if new ideas or voters appear. I know we haven't heard 
from all bot users; I'll add a notice to the irc channel topic. Unless more support appears, it looks like the squeak 
bots will be heading back to their little room..

Thanks!
-Simon



Responses so far:

Ken Causey wrote:
 > a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

Andreas Raab wrote:
 > I think all signs of life are helpful. However, not being a heavy IRC
 > user myself, I will defer to those of us who are ;-)

Ken G. Brown wrote:
 > b. I think they present interesting and valuable information. Thx!  I believe however that the volume of bot postings 
obscure and damage the human interaction on #squeak IRC. I think they should have their own channel such as #squeakbots 
so that a person can look when it is desired. The bot postings should be archived so they can be reviewed later if you 
haven't been signed on to the channel for awhile.

Philippe Marschall wrote:
 > They are _really_ annoying, remove them. If I wanted to be kept up to
 > date about Squeak Source I'd use RSS feeds.

Phil (list) wrote:
 > my vote is for option b

Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:
 > b

Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
 > Simon> a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.
 >
 > Yes. I like them in the channel, in the same way as I like commits being
 > posted to squeak-dev.  It shows activity.

Tim Felgentreff wrote:
 > They are pretty disruptive when I have some questions and
 > in the middle of the conversation is a burst of commit messages.
 >
 >> my vote is for option b

Janko Mivšek wrote:
 > First let me say that this is in overall a great idea and worth
 > continuing with it. So thanks for setting those bots up. I think that
 > with few more tweaks we can achieve a desired effect for most of the people.
 >
 > So I vote for c.
 >
 > Namely, commits bot is much more frequent comparing to blog and
 > specially StackOverflow ones. Later ones are more important for most
 > people, so there is a problem, commits bot overshadows those later two.
 > You cannot distinguish their posts easily from commit posts.
 >
 > I therefore propose that commits go to the separate channel while only
 > the daily summary report is posted to #squeak channel.
 >
 > That way we'll achieve both: showing the activity for the broader public
 > in main channel , while notifying the commits ASAP for those interested
 > in a separate channel.