Attention Network Administrators

ed · Last edited by ed on Jun 10, 2004 8:56pm; edited 1 time in total

SearchIRC has been working on a new development for the past few months, the IRC Administrators Guild (IRCAG). The IRC Administrators Guild is an association of individuals involved with the organization and management of IRC networks. We will exist to serve and support IRC Administrators in all aspects of their network. Though still in its infancy, we are opening up membership to all network administrators.

You can read our mission statement, by clicking here

You can visit our web site at www.ircag.org.

Again, the guild is open only to network administrators.

codemastr · Idler Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 345

What's this, like attempt #27 at trying to get admins together?

uchat · Idler Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 335

If you read the mission statement you'll see it's a bit different Smile

...

Ashen · Idler Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 284

I've noticed that people always say certain projects have been done before, yet they never link to the previous times it has been attempted, or provide any helpful input in terms of "these other guys made mistakes X, Y and Z..... here is a suggestion as to how you can do it better..."

What's needed is not "this has been done before", but "this has been done before, and here's what you can learn from the history..".

-A

w00t · Posted: Jun 10, 2004 9:02pm Post subject:

Unlucky me, we only have 30 regulars Wink

codemastr · Idler Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 345

ed · Posted: Jun 11, 2004 4:25pm Post subject:

Thank you codemastr for your input. I do disagree with you on the point that "most admins do not want to join a community." I believe that, if setup correctly, admins will want to join a community, to better their network, and others. This isn't all about helping others, the goals of the IRCAG also extend to helping our members own networks.

That said, I have restructed the membership system, removing two of the previous requirements, and explained our structure a bit more. See it here

uchat · Idler Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 335

codemastr · Idler Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 345

Ashen · Idler Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 284

I'd like to draw a parallel between IRCAG and the formerly well known cyberarmy.com site (now cyberarmy.net).

Essentially, I learned several things about big projects like this from being a part of that community.

1) If you set your goals too high, you achieve nothing.
Lets forget lobbying for laws on behalf of IRC networks, lets forget costly legal stuff,
lets focus on the basics - getting admins together, trying to give IRC as a whole some kind
of direction, helping new admins, and being a talkshop for admins.
2) The greatest influence an organisation has is the invisible effect its members have on the
world after they leave.
Schools know this. Universities know this. IRCAG should know this.
IRCAG in and of itself is a resource for admins - however it is those admins that go on to shape
the IRC environment for all of us.
As such, if we can guide young admins towards constructive methods of dealing with problems,
and away from things like DoSing other networks or similar, then we will have changed culture
for the better.
3) Talk is valuable.
If you get a bunch of clueful people in a room together, and start them talking, ideas will
emerge from nowhere and things never before suggested will suddenly appear obvious as
different people with different skills hash out ideas.
I saw this happen yesterday in the channel.

Put simply, if we set up IRCAG to do things like lobbying governments to make laws favourable
to IRC, then yes, we'll fail. However, if we set it up to be an educational resource, a way to
keep admins informed, alert, and empowered with tools to protect themselves from common
problems that effect them, then we can be much more successful.
We don't need to change the world - however,
we can have a lot of success if we concentrate on the basics.

-Ashen

Ashen · Idler Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 284

Syntax:
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Quote by codemastr
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my reply

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If I were in charge, I'd certainly make a rule against spamming/DoS. Like, if you are found to be spamming for your network on other IRC networks, or DoSing other networks, and someone can prove that, then you are kicked out of the community.
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Yes, this is a good idea.

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But my point here is, yeah I understand the goal is to better your own IRC network. But, not at the expense of others. And I think the latter is what many people will try to use it as.
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I doubt that is possible, given the structure of our group, and the peer-review system we
have.

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the majority of the group, in my opinion, isn't going to want to help others. Sure, there are going to be some people who do things for the good of others, but most are going to be selfish. What I mean by this is, I would not be suprised if some admins gave intentionally bad how-tos, just to try and make other networks fail. Again, not to generalize, not everyone would do that, but if networks are willing to resort to DoSing other networks to steal users, you can bet they'd resort to giving false info to beginners.
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I think that people can potentially be encouraged into helping others. I also think that anyone who submitted deliberately false info to newbies would be swiftly kicked out of the group.

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Well, I don't mind contributing, I'd love to see something like this succeed, I just don't think it will. Of course, I won't be joining, for the simple fact that I don't run an IRC network. My problem is, I think I know IRC admins, particularly small server admins, too well. It seems you are underestimating the "evilness" of many admins.
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No, I think you only know some admins, not a large number, and you tend to know the ones who associate with your Unreal IRCd.
I doubt if they represent admins as a whole.

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1.) My first impression when I read the mission statement was one of humour. Whenever I read about "talking to the media" and "lobbying for laws," for IRC, I always laugh. Because, for example, are you guys going to hire a lobbyist to go to the Congress and do as his name implies, stand in the lobby and bug the congressmen? I had a professor who was a lobbyist, let me tell you, they aren't cheap. She said she would make about $80,000/year (and from what I understand, that's cheap). I doubt you're going to do that. So I always laugh when I hear these things simply because, none of the groups I've seen have the resources to make it possible. So basically, your lobbying is going to be writing letters, which anyone can do (I do it all the time, in fact I sent 3 letters to my Senators just the other day). Plus, there will be conflicting ideas on what exactly is in IRC's best interest. In my mind, such a group should support laws that ban mp3 sharing over IRC and such. Others will say, such a group should try to get rid of such laws. You will definately have vastly different opinions on "what is best for IRC."
And the media, whenever I hear of IRC and the media, I always remember the Fizzer Task Force. They would issue all these press releases, and they tried to make them all official looking and such ("FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE"), then they pretty much just use them to show off with a "look at all the different news sites that used our press release!" page. And in reality, the biggest news organization that got it was CNET, no CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC, etc. So it was all hype in my mind. It might not be funny to others, but it is to me.
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See my points about our goals : imho, they have nothing to do with the media.

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2.) Security discussions. I am a member of CERT-IRC, which deals with IRC security. They have very strict rules. After all, when you want full disclosure, you need to try and make sure people on the list aren't the guys who are going to be doing the exploiting. I can tell you this, I would definately not be comfortable posting exploits about IRC related software on IRCAG. I would think, as I said, most admins there would think it is "funny" to go and attack other IRC networks, or their users. I mean I could see it now, the mIRC 6.11(?) exploit being used to try and kill off most of a network's users. Or an IRCd exploit that lets you hack oper privledges and then someone goes on as an oper and kills everyone with messages like, "Harrassing users is fun!" just to get users mad at that network and consider leaving.
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See my point about our goals, imho, they have nothing to do with detailed discussions about code/exploits/etc...... though that would be welcome and interesting,
it has nothing to do with what I focus on (education for admins, information, co-operation between networks, being a talkshop).

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3.) Recommending shell hosts/ircds/services. That's a great idea, however, in my mind, there are legal flaws. You recommend ShellHostA, you say they are great. I go, and I get a shell from ShellHostA. It goes down every 20 minutes, they over charged my credit card, and then they just terminated my account for no reason after taking my money. I now decide to sue IRCAG for providing bad advice. Scenarios like that, though sad, do occur. The only way to really protect yourself against such things is to have a lawyer. And, as with a lobbyist, they aren't free. Will you get sued? Probably not. But, you never know, lawsuits seem to be the "cool" thing to do.
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We are in no way an official reccomendation service, we do not claim to be right. Information should be offered 'as is', without explicit or inplicit guarentee of accuracy.
If we simply put "This information has no guarentee of accuracy and we are not responsible for the consequences of its use" into a disclaimer, does that not provide us a lot of protection?

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4.) It is limited to irc admins. The IRC community, even excluding users, is much more than just admins. You have client programmers, bot programmers, services programmers, ircd programmers, etc. No, I'm not trying to come up with some way so that I can join, my point is, when you want to do some of the things you want to do, non-admins can be helpful. Speaking from my own experience, it's amazing how many people have written documentation for Unreal. What's more amazing is how many of them have things wrong. When someone says "I found documentation on blah.com about Unreal that said..." my first comment is "Use our documentation." And, if IRCAG wrote up its own set of docs for Unreal, I'd be doing the same thing. Providing help is great, but it's only useful if it is accurate. The other reason having programmers could be useful is, for example, security. If someone finds an exploit in an IRC client or an IRCd, the admins can't do much about that. You have to contact the programmer. Then you have users. IRC admins and IRC users often have different ideas about where IRC should be heading. Again, to use mp3s as an example. Many admins want mp3s off their network simply because of legal issues (they want to make sure they aren't liable). However, the users of that server might not like that idea. They might want mp3s. So, even if 100% of the IRCAG admins decide, "yes, lobby for more mp3 legislation," it's possible that only 10% of the entire IRC community agrees with that. So how can you claim to "lobby for laws that promote IRC," and "speak with a unified voice," when you are leaving out the most important part of a network, the users.
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There are quite simply too many users for us to accomadate into the AG at the moment without it bursting. It is an AG, not a UG.
There are already other places (like your CERT-IRC) where coders gather, this is a place targetted at admins.
Of course if we get good momentum then we may forge links with other IRC related communities such as CERT-IRC : "help! someone just found a new exploit on our network, could you look at it and see if other
ircds are vulnurable / see if it's fixable?" : but for the moment, we are building, and we are building *as a group for admins*.

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5.) You say you are "non-political" then say you will "address political issues." Well if you address political issues, doesn't that make you political? You are going to be taking a stance. When you are lobbying for laws, by definition, you are political. You are arguing for *your* political interest. So how can you claim to be non-political? It's a contradiction.
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Yes we do become political if we do this - however, I hope the AG stays away from political issues and tries to remain impartial and objective.
I also hope that it provides the much needed service of simply presenting all the information on the various perspectives (like the various IRCds) and letting the admins decide for themselves.
Is that a detailed enough description of why I don't think this will work?

codemastr · Idler Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 345

Ashen · Idler Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 284

You haven't replied to most of my points from my previous post, but I will reply to all of yours.

Yes, we may get sued, but I hope the AG is structured such that this is unlikely.

Unreal and Unreal-like ircds may be 1/3rd of searchircd listed networks' ircd types,
however that is in terms of number of servers....... not number of users or quality of network.
In short - I find that a lot of the big/quality networks have more users per server (because their
servers are better) and they tend not to use Unreal-like ircds. I don't deny that some do,
and I don't deny that Unreal and similar are perfectly valid ircds to use - however you must
recognise that you may be giving more weight to the culture you know then it really has in
IRC as a whole.

My central point is that by bringing together some clueful admins from a vareity of IRC backgrounds,
we may be able to get creative juices flowing and create useful stuff.

My personal ambitions for what I hope the AG can accomplish are:
1) To ensure everyone wanting to start a server/network has a rough guide/helpfile that helps them avoid common pitfalls and build better networks.
2) To provide a way to get clueful people together so that new ideas crop up and spin-off projects are created.
3) To keep all admins informed about IRC-wide events (like the releasing of a buggy new mirc version) that effect all of us - thus helping everyone and hopefully helping to unite us a bit more.
4) To provide a forum where admins can learn from each other.

Anything else it does is a bonus - I'm only working on a small section of it.

-Ashen

al5001 · Lurker Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 181 Location: Canada

codemastr · Idler Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 345