[llvm-dev] IRC spam

[Stefan Stipanovic via llvm-dev]

Is the channel now purposefully invite-only? If so, how is one supposed to
join?

Thanks,
Stefan

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 12:23 PM Renato Golin via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> 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
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