Simon Michael wrote:

My question is: What should be done with the bots currently announcing in the #squeak IRC channel ?

a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

I think all signs of life are helpful. However, not being a heavy IRC user myself, I will defer to those of us who are ;-)

Cheers, - Andreas

2009/9/19, Simon Michael simon@joyful.com:

Aloha!

I'm back from vacation, and have been reviewing how the IRC bots in #squeak and #etoys performed. Also, now that we've had a chance to observe them for a few weeks, I'd like to formally poll the community to confirm or reject the current setup. I have heard mostly positive feedback but some folks think the noise outweighs the benefit. Just to be clear, this mail is about announcements on IRC, not the commit announcements on the mail list.

Recap and some observations:

• four bots are running in #squeak (squeaksourcebot, squeaktrunkbot,

squeakbugsbot, squeakplanetbot) and two in #etoys (etoysupdatesbot, etoystrackerbot). The last two are quiet and uncontroversial so I'll ignore those.

• the bots ran pretty well unattended. I asked several squeakers to keep an

eye on them but no maintenance was needed. Mean time between failures (unexpected terminations due to loss of irc connection) was about one bot-day. Cron restarted downed bots periodically so outages hopefully weren't too noticeable. As an extra safeguard all bots were restarted nightly; this is normally not done.

• the bots are generic rss/atom feed announcers, emitting at least one irc

message per new feed item. I can tweak them quite a bit, but I'd prefer not to maintain special-purpose #squeak-specific bots.

• currently, each bot can announce up to 5 new items every 15 minutes. The

downside of reducing the max announce rate is increased time lag when announcing bursts of activity.

• also, a single item with an unusually long squeaksource commit description

gets split up into multiple irc messages. (This is rare but I'll probably change this.)

• most noise comes from the commit bots: squeaktrunkbot and especially

squeaksourcebot. squeakbugsbot once or twice announced 20ish items, presumably due to a genuine burst of bug-updating activity.

• when reviewing irc logs, bot noise sometimes looks overwhelming only

because there wasn't much human discussion going on. Look at the timestamps or participate in the channel in real time to get a better feel for it.

• commit activity comes in waves, as you'd expect. Some days are quiet. We

had a couple of very heavy days while I was away, probably due to ESUG. Commit activity will probably increase over time.

• I want the bots to reflect community consensus, so I'm posting here on the

mail list and would like to hear from as many as possible. I think opinions from the regular #squeak users should probably carry more weight than the rest.

Poll:

My question is: What should be done with the bots currently announcing in the #squeak IRC channel ?

a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

b. Move them all to back to #squeak-in-depth or elsewhere, they are damaging #squeak!

c. Move the noisy commit bots to a separate channel, keep others where they are.

d. I have a better idea: ...

Please respond (any way you like) to this mail list thread to help me know what to do. Please do respond even if you are happy with the status quo, so we get an accurate picture.

They are _really_ annoying, remove them. If I wanted to be kept up to date about Squeak Source I'd use RSS feeds. Same goes for commit mails btw, that's really 90ies tech.

Cheers Philippe

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"Simon" == Simon Michael simon@joyful.com writes:

Simon> a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

Yes.

I like them in the channel, in the same way as I like commits being posted to squeak-dev. It shows activity.

Hi Simon,

Simon Michael pravi: ...

a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

b. Move them all to back to #squeak-in-depth or elsewhere, they are damaging #squeak!

c. Move the noisy commit bots to a separate channel, keep others where they are.

d. I have a better idea: ...

First let me say that this is in overall a great idea and worth continuing with it. So thanks for setting those bots up. I think that with few more tweaks we can achieve a desired effect for most of the people.

So I vote for c.

Namely, commits bot is much more frequent comparing to blog and specially StackOverflow ones. Later ones are more important for most people, so there is a problem, commits bot overshadows those later two. You cannot distinguish their posts easily from commit posts.

I therefore propose that commits go to the separate channel while only the daily summary report is posted to #squeak channel.

That way we'll achieve both: showing the activity for the broader public in main channel , while notifying the commits ASAP for those interested in a separate channel.

Best regards Janko

Good morning all. Three days ago I wrote:

What should be done with the bots currently announcing in the #squeak IRC channel ?

a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

b. Move them all to back to #squeak-in-depth or elsewhere, they are damaging #squeak!

c. Move the noisy commit bots to a separate channel, keep others where they are.

d. I have a better idea: ...

Responses are summarised below. By my count the votes so far have been aaabbbbbc. This surprised a little; the yay-sayers have been much more visible to me.

In the d category Ian Trudel suggested waiting for inactivity and Randal and Bert agreed. That's a good feature idea and I've implemented it, thanks. All the squeak and etoys bots now wait for 5 minutes of silence before speaking.

Ken Brown suggested an archive to read in batch mode; that's http://planetmisc.squeak.org , or pointing your feed reader to the individual feeds.

Also long items now get truncated to fit a single irc message.

I'll wait a few days to see if these change anyone's mind, or if new ideas or voters appear. I know we haven't heard from all bot users; I'll add a notice to the irc channel topic. Unless more support appears, it looks like the squeak bots will be heading back to their little room..

Thanks! -Simon

Responses so far:

Ken Causey wrote:

a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

Andreas Raab wrote:

I think all signs of life are helpful. However, not being a heavy IRC user myself, I will defer to those of us who are ;-)

Ken G. Brown wrote:

b. I think they present interesting and valuable information. Thx! I believe however that the volume of bot postings

obscure and damage the human interaction on #squeak IRC. I think they should have their own channel such as #squeakbots so that a person can look when it is desired. The bot postings should be archived so they can be reviewed later if you haven't been signed on to the channel for awhile.

Philippe Marschall wrote:

They are _really_ annoying, remove them. If I wanted to be kept up to date about Squeak Source I'd use RSS feeds.

Phil (list) wrote:

my vote is for option b

Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:

b

Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

Simon> a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.

Yes. I like them in the channel, in the same way as I like commits being posted to squeak-dev. It shows activity.

Tim Felgentreff wrote:

They are pretty disruptive when I have some questions and in the middle of the conversation is a burst of commit messages.

...

my vote is for option b

Janko Mivšek wrote:

First let me say that this is in overall a great idea and worth continuing with it. So thanks for setting those bots up. I think that with few more tweaks we can achieve a desired effect for most of the people.

So I vote for c.

Namely, commits bot is much more frequent comparing to blog and specially StackOverflow ones. Later ones are more important for most people, so there is a problem, commits bot overshadows those later two. You cannot distinguish their posts easily from commit posts.

I therefore propose that commits go to the separate channel while only the daily summary report is posted to #squeak channel.

That way we'll achieve both: showing the activity for the broader public in main channel , while notifying the commits ASAP for those interested in a separate channel.