Talk:Freenode

Since virtually all of the material in this article is disputed by Angeles on the basis that it was provided by me, I've removed the disputed material. This left a discussion of GNAA attacks on freenode, which by itself does not seem to be NPOV.

From what I can tell, Angeles' main objection to the historical material is that it's provided by me, and that it is somehow inappropriate for me to provide such material. I can tell you that this is the same material provided to LWN and published on the freenode website, but while I believe that Angeles is biased, on the basis of his public writings, against me and against freenode, I'm sensitive to his observations. However, since I'm the only person who has been involved with freenode since its beginnings as a small GNU/Linux support channel on EFNet, no one else has stepped up to provide information and, as a result, I suspect that this article should be left as a stub.

However, I'm not an active Wikipedia participant, and Angeles has already questioned my reliability, so I leave it to whoever is able to provide material that Wikipedia will consider more appropriate to insert that material.

66.69.188.201 02:12, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Addendum: for policy justification, see WP:IAR.

66.69.188.201 02:19, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

To clarify, the changes to this page and to the actual article from IP 66.69.188.201 were my changes.

Rob Levin 02:28, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

This IMHO should be more aggressively pushed as a comm channel

/join #wikipedia

agreed - it's beyond stupid to not mention the wikipedia channels on freenode Snottily 21:59, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

If you're going to mention Wikipedia, then you'll probably want to also mention some of the other big projects that have channels on freenode. --CCFreak2K 00:22, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

look out for WP:SELF Pimlottc 21:36, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

The discussion of this page has included insinuations that controversial material has been omitted. Is there properly-attributed material that needs to be added? If so, please add it and let's move on. The suggestion has been advanced that edits I made evidence a conflict of interest. Who cares? Add material or remove it as appropriate, again making sure that any material that's retained has proper citation and attribution. Is there unverifiable material? The insinuation has been made by Angeles that this is the case. If so, remove the material. Is the article in neutral point of view? Stressing GNAA trolling incidents in the article suggests that they are one of the most important things about freenode, which doesn't sound very NPOV to me.

The principal editor in all of this has been Angeles, whose neutral point of view is highly suspect (reference his [blog article of April 26]. I believe leaving the article as-is, with big warnings that it's "questionable," serves only to satisfy a personal agenda. Is this appropriate?

Please, just get it fixed.

--Rob Levin 01:01, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't believe anything I had written was from a non-WP:NPOV neutral point of view. I respect freenode's vision, and merely attempted to use citable references on the history of the network. My personal opinions of any particular person does not affect my morality, or the way I edit an article when I see something that needs fixing. From the last time I edited this page, alot of citations have been removed and the page has been totally torn apart, making the two nights of work I put into cleaning up the article and citing references a waste of my time. Sorry for trying to be objective. Angeles 14:58, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Controversy?

It looks like a lot of effort has been put in to keep any hint of controversy out of this page. To my mind, this is unfair to people wishing to find an ircnet to host their projects etc who refer to this wiki for information. I'd like to see some work put in to present the various controversies surrounding PDPC, lilo, spinhome, etc. in a balanced way, or at least some assurance that decent presentations of same will not be deleted simply because the page maintainers don't like it. I'm usually in #f-s if you want to chat about this. Mike Ely 05:30, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

We write about controversy everywhere else, why not here? There's certainly a lot of well documented stuff about donations being used to pay Rob Levin's student loans, as well as huge security flaws and limitations in their outdated irc software (and that's just what's been admitted by freenode staff, you should try talking to the ex-staff) -- Someone else

So write it (and cite it, as usual, following WP:VERIFY, WP:CITE, and WP:RS). Wikipedia doesn't really have "maintainers", except a pool of editors such as yourself. If there's something missing, write it. If it's removed without a good rationale...then you have a valid complaint, and Wikipedia does have many ways to resolve such issues. Do you have specific examples of edits aimed at supressing such info? DMacks 03:24, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Freenode hacked into woodchips...

http://tgmandry.blogspot.com/2006/06/worlds-largest-foss-irc-network.html

I cleaned up the section about the attack and added info about last night's meeting. I don't have any citations to support the 1000 users number, but I was there and observed the number myself. Actually, I suspect the number may have been upwards of 1500 or 2000, but I stopped keeping track when the meeting began. -- Zarvok | Talk 08:34, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

It's definitely NOT the GNAA or bantown that did it, although they'd both love to claim responsibility. Especially not GNAA, all the talent left that organization over a year ago. -- Somebody

From what I've seen it's most likely bantown, no one I've spoken to who has a clue thinks it was GNAA. I've spoken to the user said to have committed the attack and he said he was bantown (and knew a hell of a lot about the attack). -- Anonymous

Something is wrong in the history section

"he started a small Linux support channel called #linuxneo on the EFnet IRC network." "It then moved from Undernet to DALnet"

He started the channel on EFnet and then moved it from Undernet to DALnet. Could someone who knows the real history correct this please.

Because thats incorrect. He didn't start a channel at all. He didn't like the chanops of #linpeople and the other surrounding channels on EFNet, and started his own network to get away from them. Undernet and DALnet never factored in here. I refuse to edit this article as Rob Levin, in his overly paranoid ways, will see this as some sort of "social engineering attack" (as he puts it) and change it back. However, I was a regular user of #linpeople at this time, and it never moved to other networks. It went straight from EFNet to his own server. Diablo-D3 08:20, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The above statement by Diablo-D3 is unverified and untrue. The only way I know to verify who started #linpeople (it was in fact me) is to ask Pauline Middelink, who is one of the people I consulted with when I first thought about ramping up #linuxneo, the first incarnation of #linpeople on EFNet. I'm perfectly happy with Wikipedia leaving out unconfirmed information, in which category the above statement by Diablo-D3 certainly may be counted. Rob Levin 04:55, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Policy Concerns

Verifability

In agreement with the previous section, the history in this article is sketchy and unverified. According to Rob Levin's User Page he was editing anonymously until the 1st of July 2005, the contribution history shows some serious edits by him to this article. While the information is straight from the founder of the network, there are no cited references from reliable/published sources, which I think could be a violation of WP:VERIFY. Information must be reliable, not merely truth or accepted fact.

At the time I consulted with Wikipedia people on #wikipedia on freenode. I mention this not to validate the information I provided without logging in, but only to make sure it's understood that I've asked Wikipedia participants before adding anything to articles which have historically been edited most extensively for trolling purposes.

My assumption at the time was that active Wikipedia contributors would simply decide the validity of the material and either remove it or add references. Rob Levin 05:00, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Neutral Point of View

In relation to the above reference to anonymous contributions; As the supposed founder of this network, I feel much more reliable historical references could have been provided, instead of a tiny blurb about himself and a (very) brief description of what took place when it was founded. I think some of the edits made during this period could be deemed questionable, if not outright self-promotion (even if done in an ad-hoc way of providing useful information), as far as WP:NPOV is concerned.

Since I'm not an active Wikipedia contributor, my only interest in contributing to this article was to provide minimal information where it was lacking, in a form which could then be amended to meet Wikipedia standards. If you want to take the time to put in more information, or to remove information which you feel is lacking in reliable attribution, please do, though you may want to pass that task on to someone whose personal public writings on the subject of the article better exhibit neutral point-of-view than do yours. Rob Levin 05:14, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Citations

A quick search reveals a few references still online or archived, such as the LISC Online Support Document Archived at ibiblio.org, as well as mailing list, online magazine, and archived promotional material, most dating back to the original conception (LISC) that lead to the birth of freenode.

Any of the above material could have been searched and cited at any time for historical information.

Angeles 08:34, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Updates

Angeles 09:26, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

After perusing guidelines regarding Self References I have decided to leave the information currently present intact, and have left warning messages up which may need to be edited. It is in my opinion that one is not to post to articles content regarding themselves because it is a conflict of interest.

It's also worth suggesting that when a Wikipedia contributor has published public articles relating to the subject of a wikipedia article, which are clearly not neutral in their point of view, that contributor should consider whether it makes sense, given the goals of Wikipedia, that they edit the article. Your blog article of April 26 provides an excellent case in point. Rob Levin 05:31, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I will begin adding references to the citations I have found, and will endeavour to find some more to pad-out some of the history section. Who knows, I may learn something in the process :)

Angeles 10:13, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

References to LISC and linpeople have been added, and transcribed the already written analogy of the transtition between EFnet, Undernet, and DALnet; although I am not too happy with the unverifiable nature of the first part of Paragraph 2, it ws already contained in the document and should be subject to review before removing, altering, or leaving the statement.

Some bits may need re-wording (my eyes are starting to burn with wiki-overload) and there's still a bit more to add, but this makes a good start I think.

Top Channels data

What kind of data was used for the ranking and what do the numbers represent? Average messages/hour over a week? Average number of users joined? Bytecount? DMacks 04:36, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing... Is it the average? It can't be the number at any point in time, as that's always changing... Daniel15 (^Talk/_Contribs) 01:44, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Precaution semiprotect

I semiprotected the article just in case, because the latest fad seems to be inducing large amounts of vandalism on the articles of the recently deceased (and Rob Levin just died). I can imagine a swarm of GNAAers beating the crap out of this article, so let's just try this. —this is messedrocker (talk) 21:35, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

The source for the death announcement was from a global message by freenode staffer christel in IRC. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 21:36, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Disputes

The paragraph on "social engineering" isn't very clear. The grammar should be cleaned up and specific examples provided.

The "April Fools Joke" should be explained in detail as well.

Freenode user statistics?

Hello,

How many user/day per month and over the years are actually using freenode? Can someone add this info to the article?

regards,

89.48.228.195 08:31, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Hello,

You have to follow the reference #4 to find several statistics about it.

-- skiidoo 01:41, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Suggested sources

These can be used to clean up the article/clear the {{primary sources}} and {{notability}} flags:

• [1] Australian print source about Levin's death.
• [2] The Register article about sale of OpenProjects domains
• [3] The Inquirer article about nickserv hack
• [4] Cursory mention from Indian print source

Please do not remove the flags until they are resolved. I'll try to help tomorrow or Monday, if noone else has time, but I haven't time to deal with it further today. MrZaius^talk 11:07, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Done. MrZaius^talk 16:59, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Not listed on mIRC

The by far most popular IRC client, mIRC has a server/networks list a mile long, but Freenode is not included in it. Is there a known explanation for this? __meco (talk) 03:26, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, the old one at mirc.com/servers.ini has it (updated Jan '07!?), unless chat.freenode has been disabled; and mirc.com/servers.html tries and fails to link to the current servers.ini file, so maybe the official, up-to-date file is nowhere to be found outside of the installation package. b0at (talk) 04:52, 15 April 2008 (UTC)