"The current members of the IRC SIG have taken no initiative to make this happen themselves."
- I'd like to state that some of us do stick up for the users when things get out of hand:
- https://fedorahosted.org/irc-support-sig/ticket/174
- https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-03-26/irc-support-sig.2015-03-26-17.00.log.html

Before something is done, could we make sure that all current OPs are being contacted about this ticket and presented, maybe a summary, of previous discussions?

I apologize if that came off as dismissive of your efforts Striker. Thank you for standing up for the users and common decency. What I meant is that, as a group, the IRC SIG has not responded to the council-discuss thread by proposing to implement changes themselves and instead deflected to outside authority.

Replying to [ticket:71 be0]:
...snip first part that paints lots of people with one brush...

Proposed changes from the council-discuss thread:
1. Making channel OP privileges a temporary position

some questions:

1. I assume this means clearing the current list.
2. How long would someone have this position?
3. What process changes the list?

1. Logging administrative actions in a private log for all IRC SIG members to reference

As noted, we do already have this as part of a bot plugin. Although we could use someone coding a better search or reporting function (upstream first): https://github.com/ncoevoet/ChanTracker

1. Soliciting other parts of Fedora for new IRC contributors, including Ask.FPO, CommOps, devel and test lists, and the Diversity SIG. However, it is not likely many new contributors will come unless there is actually reason to believe meaningful change will take place on the Fedora IRC channels.

I think pretty much everyone agrees having more polite and helpful folks is a great goal. At least I personally do. I don't personally think they should all be made ops, but I guess thats back to the first item.

ok as the senior person with ops ( i was made a channel op by warren back in fc3)

I really want to see everyone on this council to spend time in the #fedora channel helping for at least one week (walk in our shoes as they say)
yes irc is a bad place, we try to be polite and with all text mediums that sometimes comes across the wrong way.

I'll try to make some time to hang out in the channel next week. I do appreciate the effort that this takes.

A few ideas came out of the council meeting. Your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated:

• What if we split moderation and ops duties. Under this model, ops does technical work and enacts moderator decisions that require privileges as needed. Moderators would be drawn from ambassadors, diversity and commops. The groups are already charged with helping with friendliness and accessibility. Those groups would need to decide how to determine who is a moderator and for how long.

• Assuming a moderator/ops split, ops could serve as an in the moment reality check for moderator decisions.

• Consider guidelines for how to log problems and Code of Conduct violations. Consider anonymized external reporting.

• Hold annual elections (or release cycle elections) for ops.

1. I think ops should follow https://freenode.net/catalysts
2. I think the current process for making ops is fine, except there should possibly be more ops added so people can "take a break" more often.
3. If there is a problem with an particular op, then the ops, or the council can vote to suspend or remove them.
4. Yes, sometimes people are not that friendly. That should be addressed to that specific person, i.e. I don't think the ops process is broken, but maybe some of the ops are just not following the rules.

Replying to [comment:7 bex]:

A few ideas came out of the council meeting. Your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated:

• What if we split moderation and ops duties. Under this model, ops does technical work and enacts moderator decisions that require privileges as needed. Moderators would be drawn from ambassadors, diversity and commops. The groups are already charged with helping with friendliness and accessibility. Those groups would need to decide how to determine who is a moderator and for how long.

• Assuming a moderator/ops split, ops could serve as an in the moment reality check for moderator decisions.

I fear this would be pretty complex and lead to situations where one or the other group is not around and no action is taken, or the process bypassed.

• Consider guidelines for how to log problems and Code of Conduct violations. Consider anonymized external reporting.

Sure, but again, I think this could get too complex... we do have the logs in the bot currently.
If we made sure annotations are in there would that be enough?

• Hold annual elections (or release cycle elections) for ops.

I don't think thats a good way to go about things. It could lead to people voting for whoever they think (or know) would let them get away with things, would cause more voter fatigue, and seems out of place for a technical position.

Now, I don't want to be all negative here, and I am personally not adverse to change.
Some more ideas I'll toss out:

• Since the irc sig doesnt have too many active members these days and currently only meets when we have open tickets, perhaps we could pull them into the commops meetings/list. Just have a section to discuss issues there and increase visibility to perhaps bring in more active people.

• If we can get folks from ambassadors, diversity and commops interested in helping out in channel perhaps come up with some way to promote from them to ops after they have proven they will be around and are suited for/interested in doing that.

I really think the best way to improve friendlyness is not by increasing enforcement or punishment, but by simply having lots more friendly people around. So, I am personally also very much in favor of trying to increase the helpfull, friendly people in channel.

I agree with Kevin.

I'd like to suggest that while anonymized external reporting is good, it is in the best interests of the community to be using a system that also:

1) needs to be logged into to view relevant content, with open public registration
2) Has a community-determined age limit for expiration of that content.

Without that, those types of systems can become:

re: Anonymized External Reporting, Closed Viewing, Open Public Registration
-) A vehicle for public humiliation (chronicling arguments from IRC on the web forever, sharing links during groupthink breakdowns et al)
-) or blacklisting ("ban this person, I found this fedora log")

re: content expiration:
-) Prevention of users from being able to outlive their mistakes. It is too easy for a dislocated entity to eventually become trigger happy with exiling problematic users, and I think this can detract from the purpose and nobility of the role these groups would serve.

I like the direction you guys are headed with this and support it fully, I'd just like to recommend these 2 aspects to avoid mistakes I've seen made in other places (and have even made myself at times).

We should bear in mind that while this has been a problem in Fedora for some time, not only is there all too often crossover between channels when the wrong people get into positions of authority, there can often be continued efforts towards an argument and it's not always the user. These will improve the welcoming environment Fedora is trying to foster.

IRC arguments can become quite heated and long lasting, and this will protect the users as well as the operators during diffusion.

Good luck, and good job if you can bring this split concept to Fedora IRC governship, I think it's well understood that the current ops list in most channels could use an occassional power cycle.

--two cents

Just a comment as I was at least one of the people suggesting "reporting" in the council meeting. And, to clarify, what I meant was non-anonymized reporting of the person doing the banning not the banned. Basically to have visibility in to the enforcement of policy, with visibility attached, because there seems to be a breakdown in "over-enforcement" which is what lead to some of this discussion.

re: Kevin's comments
I would say that the ops have perms/policy/whatnot to be the fall back moderator if there is no one in channel from the outreach orgs. Basically, what I really want here is, most of the time, is a two-phase commit on enforcement actions and people who have actively chosen to do outreach to do the first wave of discussion. However, the outreach people are not ops people and we don't have to make the rules draconian as long as it works most of the time.

i agree with you on elections

definite +1 on the "pull irc sig/tickets in to commops meetings"

+1 on "more friendly people might just solve this"

re: Phanes comments
I agree with your two comments. And, I think that means you don't have to mention the part where you made the mistake anymore as a result ;)

Sooooo, this has been sitting here for a year. I'd like to check in — are things better? Are they worse? Is the SIG still active? I don't see any meetings or mailing list activity recently.

I'm asking this from the Fedora Mindshare FAD and this is quite relevant.

Sooooo, this has been sitting here for a year. I'd like to check in — are things better? Are they worse? Is the SIG still active? I don't see any meetings or mailing list activity recently.
I'm asking this from the Fedora Mindshare FAD and this is quite relevant.

Thank you for following up. After the lack of meaningful action on this issue I gave up using the Fedora IRC channel. I haven't used it in a long time now so I'm not sure of the present situation. As far as I can tell the user that insulted me (fenrus02 on IRC/fenris02 FAS) as reported in the old ticket (now at https://pagure.io/irc-support-sig/issue/192) never faced any consequences for violating the Code of Conduct. According to https://pagure.io/irc-support-sig/ fenris02 still an admin of the IRC SIG. Therefore I have no reason to believe the situation has improved.

They are significantly better!

On Mar 4, 2018 4:24 AM, "Matthew Miller" pagure@pagure.io wrote:

mattdm added a new comment to an issue you are following:
``
Sooooo, this has been sitting here for a year. I'd like to check in =E2=
=80=94 are
things better? Are they worse? Is the SIG still active? I don't see any
meetings or mailing list activity recently.

I'm asking this from the Fedora Mindshare FAD and this is quite relevant.
``

To reply, visit the link below or just reply to this email
https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/71

@phanes That's nice to hear. Can you give some details?

While I certainly think more direct transitions were appropriate at the time, the general climate in #fedora has actually improved.

As for details I'm a bit short but what I've done is sent some sock puppets in occasionally for interactions over the months asking some pretty basic and standard support questions and found responses to be friendly and informative (and even at times with humour) which is really all I wanted to see happen. I am not seeing users abused and haven't for quite a while there now -- I'll defer to be0's observations in case I've missed some things as I've not been interacting with Fenrus02 directly. I'm not doing any probing in an official capacity for Fedora so I have not been keeping logs of these but kind of running with a mental note of where the climate is as I probe.

Going back through the notes and given where this had gotten to when it was originally posted, I think I'd like to reiterate what I view as a long-term community need for "terms" for channel operators where they are elected/re-elected annually to serve as a continual incentive to be wary of their contribution. That also gives users as well as operators fresh chances when there are big misunderstandings (and sometimes not misunderstandings -- people grow) -- and gives community members more chances to contribute.

As long as he isn't engaging in any cross-channel blacklisting, network politics, or abusive treatment of users, or doing preferential treatment for anyone else doing the above, that's all we could ask for ultimately.

Though that process is needed I think -- the amount of effort that had to be applied to get here was rather strenuous, but then again, in most comparable communities it never would have happened so kudos to Fedora for being above standard on this because this is a pervasive issue across many distributions' communities going back decades in some cases and only a few of those communities are even addressing it in an honest fashion.

@mattdm Since this issue was brought up, the involved party on the OP side has dropped from IRC. Due to this, I believe the treatment of users in the #fedora channel has improved, though there are still some small cases of mis-treatment by non-OP users:

[Monday, January 8, 2018] [7:32:41 PM EST] <metastable> "does not work" could mean a lot of things. You've been really uncooperative toward those of us asking questions to try to help you, so you're on your own.

However, I left the channel for some time after all of this went down, so I cannot say for sure, but I believe this issue can be resolved.

Well, that would certainly explain it.
+1

mattdm:

Sooooo, this has been sitting here for a year. I'd like to check in — are things better? Are they worse? Is the SIG still active? I don't see any meetings or mailing list activity recently.
I'm asking this from the Fedora Mindshare FAD and this is quite relevant.

I don't think things have changed too much, perhaps it's been more quiet (people asking questions and no one answering them). The channel was linked to matrix, but I haven't really noticed too much of a change of traffic for it. The SIG is pretty inactive.

I'll note that fenris02 removed himself from the channel at the time of this ticket and hasn't been back since.

So, at this point: should we close this ticket? I'll note that in general, we don't strongly emphasize IRC as a primary point for user support.

@kevin do you mean that we still have bad behaviour actively going on?

Well, I have not been very active in the channel in a while, so I can't give any kind of absolute answer.

The times that I have looked in, It seems to be much more common that people ask questions and no one at all answers. I think there's only about 2 of the SIG members very active anymore, so the number of people helping has gone down in the last few years IMHO.

I think the best thing that could happen is more people showing up to help answer questions.

+1 to close. I believe that the original ticket was about hostile behaviour, not people not answering questions. It sounds like that has been resolved.

+1 to close.

Yeah, let's close this.
+1