[llvm-dev] IRC spam

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 at 01:03, Ryan Houdek <sonicadvance1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll comment from the perspective of someone that is in the Mesa, #dri-devel, #radeon channels myself and have watched their behaviour over the years. This is a real person that spams a load of information into a channel about their understanding of how hardware works.

Hi Ryan,

Yeah, half-way through I realised, as some other people pointed out,
it is a real person.

I identified as a robot for two main reasons:
 1. Really confusing sentences, intermixing completely unrelated
subjects and starting a new phrase before the old one was finished.
This is very typical of markov chain or cheap language models trained
with a small subset of unrelated texts. It's also unfortunately common
in people who can't help but work on multiple trains of thought (like
me).
 2. The random names and fast rejoin were consistent with either a
mindless bot, or a very persistent individual. I couldn't fathom why a
person would do that, so I assumed bot. That was on me for not seeing
it far enough.

> I have no idea what their goal is for spamming this information, could be some desire for acceptance from perceived smartness. Or something as simple as wanting to be hired for their "brilliance". Hard to tell.
> A major issue with their personality is that they will retaliate against anyone that tries to stop their ranting, and they become hostile with their phrasing very quickly because of it. Just check the logs for them retaliating against anyone that has kickbanned them.
> Another issue is that depending on their mood of the day, they may be entirely lost to any form of reasoning, which makes it difficult for any communication.

There are plenty of life situations that make smart people behave
erratically or crack entirely, most of them mundane to the majority of
people. It's not fun.

> On that note, they aren't completely impossible to work with in some cases, it just might require accepting getting attacked for a few weeks.
> I'm a channel operator in one of the Mesa related IRC channels and have had success in communicating with them that their behaviour is not conducive to the environment that we were attempting to create in the channel.
> This took a bit of coaxing on their "good" days, and communicating with them while being attacked for around a month on end. At the end of this month-long attack and communication I was able to get them to understand that they aren't welcome to the channel.
> They no longer enter the channel that I moderate; I managed to get through to them on some level at least.

I'm impressed with your care and stamina. Not many people I know would
have gone that far. Thank you for doing that.

> Sadly this sort of baby sitting of a user shouldn't be required and requiring some thick skin to get through their harsh comments is difficult.
> More moderation will "work" but while they are rampaging, you're going to still have to watch the channel and you'll get a few lines of harassing text while an op takes a bit of time to see them (and sometimes even perceive them, on "good" days they make comments that make some sense initially).

Any kind of barrier should be enough to get bots and persistent
individuals to stop. Moderators, registration, etc.

I think in the end it worked out well. People quickly realised those
words were meaningless (in the context of the particular channel), and
worked to stop the flood.

cheers,
--renato