Re: [tsc-devel] Retaining old IRC logs...

Chris Jacobsen | Tue, 12 Jan 2016 18:56:04 UTC

See below.

 >  1) No use.

 > It is quite unlikely that we will ever need to read through an IRC 
chatlog from ten years ago.

I have thought of specific conversations that I wanted to look up some 
times.  The only reason I did not do so in some instances was the lack 
of a search function, and it would have taken longer in those instances 
to get the necessary information to grep the files manually on Alexandria.

> 2) Abuse.

> Building on this, nobody can foresee what the data may be used for by
people other than us (or maybe even by someone of us? Nobody knows).

A simple solution would be to make all logs or old logs private, only available to team members.  This could either be exposed via a login system, or, if this is too much, we could grep them on the Alexandria server.

> 3) Against “But it was public!”

As alluded to above, we should see what everyone thinks in the community.  Do they feel comfortable having all their conversations public in the first place?  If they are not public, they could be made private, for team-only reference.

> That being said, I would also sympathise with forum and mailinglist
entries not being available publically forever as well.

I do not think any forum entries should be permanently deleted; they are even more important than IRC logs.  We went through the trouble of making a site scrape of secretmaryo.org because the history is so useful.  The same could be said about our secretchronicles.de forums.

> 4) Important events can still be preserved.
> 5) Project decisions are not made in IRC (alone) outside a GD.

Quite a while back, when default0 was suggesting ideas, we made a tentative decision to implement a life energy system for Alex and do away with the old Mario-based-power-up system.  This major discussion took place in a regular IRC discussion, not in a scheduled meeting.  It could be found again with a little thought and a search mechanism.

Obviously, this decision should be discussed more in the mailing list, but the fact remains that important decisions do come about in IRC conversations.

> 6) Log files in backups.

> The chatlog files are not going to be unavailable immediately after
deletion.

This is true, but after the backups expire, the effect is permanent.  Given the undoable nature, this is why I am cautious.

My suggestion is to consider making some or all of the logs private and using a simple storage reduction mechanism if space is an issue.  Ideally we'd need a search feature for the files to be useful, though this would be useful for very recent logs anyways.

-datahead