The_Tick's Rawr

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August 04, 2005

Of freenode and hyperion

So I've been on freenode for more than two years. In that time I've had a great time, been able to start four projects (itonamaton, Growl, Chatkit and Coal), etc. I've been able to use the network for what it is, a way to talk to and with devs. I've met people from projects I wouldn't normally, and I also made some friends.

This all stops with Hyperion.

A little bit of background though. The basic idea is to replace the ircd with a new system. There will be something called "The Registry" as well, which replaces services.

And this is where it gets all wonky. You see, they are making something new called NOIDEPREFIX in the works. What this will allow people to do is to have a "BASENAME". In todays terms, this is your registered nick, the one you authenticate to nickserv with.

After that, you can specify any number of characters based off that BASENAME. Here is the list currently of what is valid:

foo
foo_
foo`
`foo`
foo-1
[foo]
foo|ATHOME
foo[WORK]

This goes against a lot of things. We'll use the example of my nick of The_Tick. With this new system, I lost _Tick. This means that I have to be lucky enough to grab The in order to get The_Tick. This cuts a lot of people out of using The_FOO nicks, for instance.

That's not that aggrivating, in the long run I can deal with it I guess (although I've had the nick for years). I'm having multiple issues on this one:

• The people who are affected by this are all not opers. From what I can tell, no oper has one of the offending characters in their nick.
• This promotes nick change for status. That's what /away is for. If you want to see if someone is at home, they should have put that in their away message. Promoting nick changes as status is evil.
• This is going to break the buddy list feature of multiple clients.
• This is going to make irc harder for new people. If you log into a network as That_Cool_Guy, but someone has That and he kicks you off because you are taking his nick, well then you may just go trotting off into the sunset.
• It violates some rfcs. Specifically 2812. Now, this is an informational rfc and not a standard, but with irc there is no real standard so this is the best we have.
• If you talk to someone, and are not in a channel, your client cannot track their nick changes as far as I know. So if they changed it from xvirge to xvirge[HOME], you wouldn't be able to see that if you are not in a channel they are in.

While talking to the lilo and others about the issues of this, they were not interested in any feedback we were giving, other than to give myself and others marketing speak regarding the change.

From what they've said, the basic idea is to help to nurture a place for FOSS projects to thrive and be created. Unfortunately, this change is just going to infuriate people. I have better suggestions:

Sourceforge is getting pretty bad for initial projects. CVS is hard to start with, Subversion being much easier (albeit it has some of the same flaws). So with that said, here's what I propose:

1) Include other services than just IRC. If you had a open subversion repository that hooked into your IRC nick, gave people a CIA bot by default with new projects, and other things, you'd have a much better time at this.

2) Provide web hosting for project websites.

3) Other things, email for instance.

No, instead pdpc focuses on redoing their ircd and aggrivating users instead of providing services which would make more users want to donate to their cause. I'd seriously give 100 bucks to them if I could get svn/trac/webhosting and irc and cia all setup for projects when I register one, instead of having to find a hodge podge of separate systems.

Now, they won't give us _ or -, claiming that people will then want ` and | and whatever other characters. My thought is that - and _ are acceptable to keep, a lot of people do tend to use these. But unfortunately those in #hyperion on freenode do not want to budge on the subject, continuing to give everyone market speak and excuses.

So with this new system, a new forked ircd which isn't going to get a lot of testing because everyone has wallops turned off because opers have flooded them for years, and less nicks available to be registered. *sigh*

Posted by tick at August 4, 2005 01:11 PM

Comments

Posted by: hyperion at August 6, 2005 06:09 PM

Posted by: praetorian at August 9, 2005 06:31 AM