Historic:IRCVision

What is the main purpose of IRC?

• To allow the Soylent News community to congregate in a real time format
• We want the community to feel free to do (almost) anything, so it's better to have less guidelines restricting them
• We do *NOT* want to poach from SN stories.

What do we want to be available on IRC?

• Topical channels
• Channels for the various teams
  • Editorial
  • Systems
  • Other
• Game channels
  • Werewolf
  • Trivia
  • RPG channels
• Guided discussions (This is my favorite idea.. advertised on a sidebar of the main site perhaps)
  • Something like the OReilly webcasts, where we'd have our favorite people (Natalie Portman, Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates) come to talk about their project and how awesome it is.
  • Combatserver notes that there should be a strategy to keep the talks from disrupting stories on the main page, if a significant portion of the site is focused on IRC, then comments on stories published at the same time may suffer.

What do we *not* want on IRC?

• spam
• wAreZ
• Poaching from the site discussion
  • Channels for each article or live chatboxes in articles

Initial Official IRC channels:

• Team specific channels
• Main discussion channel
  • What do we name this? Probably want to keep ##AltSlashdot until the final branding is decided
• Topical channels
  • 16:01:39 Protonic ∈ It'll be interested to see things evolve. I'd say have topical channels for the site available though, e.g. #linux - and a bot in all those "official tropical channels" will automatically message the channel when a new post arrives in said category
• Off topic channel

Cloaking:

• Team members
  • Examples: Landon@Soylent/Staff/IRC/Landon, Landon@Soylent/Staff/Editor/Landon, Landon@Soylent/Staff/Dev/Landon
  • If someone is in multiple teams, we should be able to let them choose which cloak they prefer
• (future plan) Members with IRC accounts connected to the main site:
  • Should this be a requirement for registering on the IRC network? That you must have an account on the main site?
  • Examples: Landon@Soylent/USERNAME
• Registered nicks without an account on the main site (if necessary)
  • Examples: Landon@Soylent/Guest

Bots

• General utility bot for users to query weather, provide public logs, etc (I've got one in mind that we can maintain as the official bot/fun development project -- Landon)
• Name at least one bot Bender!

IRC Namespaces

• # is the only namespace that should contain Official channels once ##AltSlashdot is phased out
  • We should allow user created channels under this namespace too
• ## The wild west.
  • There should be no Official channels under this namespace, only user created

Logging

• Since it's almost guaranteed that some users will be logging, we should make it a service. There should be a bot in all of the Official channels that will gather logs and generate a webpage ( example by Juggs )
  • Opt-in logging/publishing for all user created channels (send a logging notice to people as they join the channel maybe)
  • 1-2 day delay before publishing logs, in case someone reallyreallyreally needs to redact their root password from the logs :) (But, that's a false sense of security, so eh, but it would be a courteous gesture)