We have a lot of IRC channels / rooms right now which are hooked to a bot which posts ticket activity related to the topic of that channel.
I find that this basically kills the channel for useful conversations. I get the idea, but if actual human posts have to slip in edgewise, it’s too much. Of course, I can mute the bot for myself, but that doesn’t keep the channel welcoming for others. And some bots do other, interactive things.
Therefore I propose:
Official Fedora rooms / channels should not have any bots or systems which automatically post more than once an hour, except those that are categorized under the Bot Chatter space.
Yes – if people are finding those notifications even helpful. If not, of course, we can just turn off some of those bots. I think there’s some degree of “just because we can” excitement in all the ticket-was-updated bots we have hooked up…
I think this is an excellent idea. We did something similar in the slack channels at work and it has been really nice for productivity. The human channels are better and there is even better discussion that happens in the bot channels (mostly alerts in our case) since things are more focused.
I think thats a bit heavy handed. There may be some team / sig / group that finds messages of use to their workflow…
How about just “We recommend official fedoraproject.org channels not employ bots that send unattended messages too often. Each official room may decide what this threshold is on a room by room basis. Bots sending large numbers of messages are welcome to request a room under the Bot Chatter space”
I don’t want to be too heavy-handed, but I’d like to be a little heavy-handed because I want to motivate the work to clean up the current situation before we launch.
I guess you’re right that we shouldn’t block a workflow where it might really be valuable, but I’m concerned about maybe a couple of people in a channel that say “I really actually like it!” and the result is that channel stays useful in that way to those couple of people and which doesn’t grow to include others. Moving the bot traffic to a dedicated channel lets people who find it valuable still have that, without it being the primary option.
Anyone have suggestions between Kevin’s proposal and mine? If we go with the softer one, I’d like to at least change “are welcome” to “are encouraged” or even “should”.
And maybe something like:
“What’s ‘large numbers of messages’? That’ll depend, but if it’s more than the number of human-created messages during a typical day, or if bot messages frequently intrude into conversations, it’s probably time to move them to a dedicated channel.”
Also perhaps: “Bot channel don’t need to be bot-only — people who want to be alerted for those kind of updates can use the space to converse in response, if that’s useful.”
Well, my inbox for the Fedora Linux Project is full daily from bot’s, which is good for keeping up with the state of things, but I do ignore most of them honestly. When communicating directly, whether remotely via messaging/email/chat/voip/video chat/two cans and a string, it is always better than through an automated message/announcement. I would suggest that the need for the (particular) bots’ was evident at the time of creation, and with the ever present push towards the “future”, Fedora Linux has evolved, so too has the community and how it communicates. Maybe the bot’s need an upgrade.
I’m good with that, although perhaps append to “time to move them to a dedicated channel” “or revisit if the information they send is wanted” or something.
I’d like to avoid “Oh yeah, the bot is sending too much in our room, move it to bot chatter” and then look a while later and see 0 people have joined it and it could have just been turned off.
