Welcome to the metabot project site

This is mostly a placeholder until there's real stuff here

FAQ

What is metabot/meatbot?

Metabot is an attempt at providing a better way for the operators of the Libera #perl channel to manage spammers, bans, and other toxic users. It's purpose is to record everything about why a person was removed from the channel, and when so that repeat offenders or egregious behavior can be referenced by any and all operators on the channel. Along with this it will be helping to enforce bans that are supposed to be temporary to prevent an explosion of the ban list that has happened in the past (mostly due to us being lazy and not unbanning the spammers that don't actually come back under the same user information).

Meatbot was originally a joke made about the name of the bot "metabot" being typo'd. Along with that it let me get a rather nice domain for the project.

Will the logs be public

Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Mostly no, there will be the ability to create a limited view of the logs around any given operator action that will show the affected users and the operator clearly, while masking all identifiable information about other users. This way unrelated parties don't have any information that is release but anyone who is affected can have their behavior clearly identified.

What about the GDPR?

This is all running from and in the USA so the GDPR itself shouldn't directly apply. That said the information that is being collected is all publically available to anyone in the IRC channels themselves. Along with that the data being collected is directly necessary for the correct and useful functioning of the service. As far as the EU rules that allow you to request the removal of personal data I do not know if I have any specific requirements to actually abide by such a request but since it is not in the EU I do not believe it to be so.

I was banned and don't believe I should have been

Right now there's no way for you to get at the logs yourself. There may never be a direct way for you to do so, but you can PM me (simcop2387) or email me (simcop2387 at simcop2387 dot info) to take a look if you can't contact anyone in the channel yourself. Working around the ban to get into the channel to complain will likely cause you more trouble as ban evasion (regardless of if the ban was justified or not) is usually against network policy let alone channel policy.

How can we know you can be trusted to not misuse the logs?

Realistically you probably can't know that for certain. That said I've been a part of the #perl irc community on formerly freenode and now libera for about the last 20 years and hope that I've shown myself to be of decent character and trustworthiness to anyone who has interacted with me (simcop2387).

So you if you can't be trusted what can we do?

This whole project is open source (It's just not finished or published yet), so you can run your own copy of the whole system yourself so that you can produce logs of the channel in the same manner.

I object to this kind of logging.

I understand your objections, but the logs aren't public and you can't prevent anyone from actually doing so. Many people on the channel already keep private logs and they get used to find incidents in the past already. That said the logs from this project should be much more complete than the typical logs created by most irc clients.