How often do you prune inactive chanops/opers?

Captain Kirk · none Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 13 Location: USA

Just curious. How often do you prune your inactive network channel ops and opers? I'll do it "every now and then," but don't really have a set time frame. If people just up and disappear for months on end, I'll disable their access and usually return it when they come back. I usually will prune at the six month+ mark, unless I know someone's taking a long break from IRC.

What about the rest of y'all?

ButtaKnife · Newbie Joined: 26 Apr 2005 Posts: 93

We really don't have a specific timeframe. It's more a matter of when we think about it I suppose. Six months sounds fair, though.

Joach · none Joined: 11 May 2010 Posts: 49 Location: New Jersey

If someone disappears for a week or two, without warning, I typically remove their staff position.

katsklaw · Posted: Apr 19, 2011 8:20pm Post subject:

If their nick expires ... so does their O:Line/ChanOp status unless other arrangements are pre-made.

ButtaKnife · Newbie Joined: 26 Apr 2005 Posts: 93

Robert-E-Lee · Idler Joined: 22 Nov 2004 Posts: 314 Location: IRC

not that unrealistic.

if you didn't turn up to work for a couple of weeks without bothering to phone in, you wouldn't expect to suddenly re-appear and still have a job.

Trixar_za · Posted: Apr 20, 2011 6:03am Post subject:

D3M0N · Posted: Apr 20, 2011 7:17am Post subject:

Bertrum · Eleet Joined: 30 Mar 2008 Posts: 573 Location: Venus

If they're not active over, lets say two weeks without notifying us they're going away, they get removed.

Life does happen, but it takes a second for them to send a memo saying that they are going to be afk for a week or two

PingBad · Posted: Apr 20, 2011 5:38pm Post subject:

Robert-E-Lee · Idler Joined: 22 Nov 2004 Posts: 314 Location: IRC

well to an extent it depends on the person in questions established pattern of presence, prior to the status being granted, and since then.

if they're only on every so often to begin with, then the absence is simply part of their normal pattern.

if they're on regularly and it's not normal for them, then it's a bit discourteous to just bugger off and shirk a responsibility you accepted without giving anyone a heads up.

mostly it's the discourtesy that costs people their 'status'.

ButtaKnife · Newbie Joined: 26 Apr 2005 Posts: 93

Wow. I seem to have a very different perspective than many people here. While some here after 2 weeks think, "Pfft, so-and-so should have said something. GONE!" we tend to think "...so-and-so hasn't been around in a little while. Are they okay? Surprised

"

Some of us take IRC very seriously, and though our network policies take it seriously, we can't expect all staff members to be 100% dedicated all the time. Plus, if someone is ill or going through something bad in their life, !@#$ IRC. Real life comes first.

After a few months of someone being gone, we still wonder if they're okay, but we're just inclined to consider them inactive. We've had people show up months later and apologize for being gone, but X came up and they couldn't deal with IRC. No problem!

By the way, the whole floodnet argument doesn't fly with me. If the network is properly configured *and* you have redundancy in your staff levels, then either someone else will catch it, a system will catch it, or it's a fluke and chalk it up to Murphy's Law.

mentor · Posted: Apr 21, 2011 6:02pm Post subject:

I agree that when you take a position upon yourself, volunteer or not, it IS a responsibility you have chosen and that you need to uphold. At the same time though, IRC is largely a hobby for most people and there are far more pressing real life matters to be concerned with.

We encourage our staff to give us a heads up when they know they'll be away for an extended period of time, or something comes up; however, we don't remove people for failing to do so. The only time we remove inactive staff is when we've noticed they've been gone for quite some time and we can't get in contact with them to see how they're doing.

I'm also with ButtaKnife in not buying into the floodnet argument. If you rely too heavily on one or two individuals to hold the network together, then you're going to end up disappointed at some point, whether those individuals are gone for a few weeks or a day.

PingBad · Posted: Apr 22, 2011 9:34am Post subject:

Floodnet was a mere example; Worse can happen to any network (short of things no amount of staff is going to deal with - ie: DDoS)... there are also some on-network events that do require human intervention, AI just isn't that well developed.

Anyway, my reasoning is that with staff, there is a certain expectation that they'll be there during timeframes that usually binds to a given behavioral pattern of the staff member concerned (ie: they may only be opering thursday nights between 7PM and 11PM in their own timezone) - completely understandable - and I can sympathize with real life events taking priority (IRC opering doesn't pay the bills, so of course that's going to come second to anything that does - also completely understandable, ditto medical/family events). But as I hate reading ads on these forums for networks that vanish off the face of the web less than a week after they're posted, I'm also not all that for staff members who for some quite time have been reliable only to suddenly vanish without so much as a note - especially if they've become dependable enough to be trusted to lead the other staff in my own absence.

A staff member down leaves a hole in the ranks - just for the sake of example, what say I had 18 (random number, also makes for easy math) opers covering (between them) an entire day (such that there's always at least one oper online and available at any given time to deal with any situation that may arise; Also consider that on average, there's three opers for any given 5 hour span (I'm allowing a half hour overlap at each end so one "shift" can keep the next posted on any occuring events), but two of the opers for one of those shifts fail to show up and didn't even attempt to inform anyone else... that just leaves a single oper to handle everything for the next four hours where absolutely anybody could spam some viral url (rickroll, anyone?), setup a channel or three trading netbanking details, kiddy porn, and/or <whatever-any-netadmin-would-dread-to-find-on-their-network>. I, for one, wouldn't be all that pleased to get in touch with the missing opers after a month or so absence and their only excuse was "couldn't be bothered" or something to that effect.

We're all involved with one network or another in some way, right? And absolutely nobody is a one-person-team when it comes to managing a network (no matter how big or small it is) - so we need to be able to trust and depend on our fellow opers to handle things when we're not there - someone violating that trust doesn't belong there.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

danperteet · none Joined: 28 Jan 2010 Posts: 18 Location: GA, USA

Unless we are notified beforehand, staff are usually removed after a month of inactivity, which if their nick is not set to no-expire, we'll see it expire, and know to remove. Sometimes they can be removed after less, if they are coming on the network, but not opering, or complying with staff requirements, like being in at least 1 network channel for example.
Also, I agree with PingBad's post too. Smile