crap-filled beargarden
July 17, 2006 
#wordpress regulars plead for some form of moderation as they are being overrun by trolls.
They have, apparently, been wanting this for over a year now, but Matt doesn’t have time to op the channel himself and doesn’t want to give anyone else that kind of power.
This seems reasonable enough; if you let the channel degenerate to such a state that everyone stops going there, it won’t be a problem anymore. And don’t most people going on to IRC in the first place expect it to be a crap-filled beargarden? True, it doesn’t give a great impression of wordpress, but then neither do the forums. Get with the program, people! #wordpress doesn’t involve AJAX, it won’t pull in blogging newbies and Automattic are never going to make any money from it, therefore it is never going to get any love.
Is there any reason why the regulars can’t create another channel, appoint some ops, and migrate support and productive discussion there? Because that seems a lot more fruitful than continuing to bang their heads against the brick wall that is Matt’s ego.
yeah, but they’d still have to bang their heads against it to get any sort of mention of their alternate channel in a place where a user might find it.
unless they want to get it mentioned on the alternate support forums, and _really_ take their ball and go home.
interesting… let’s see how this wparena turns out
i don’t know wank… maybe having “wordpress” on the channel name makes it “official” that’s why they don’t create new ones? ahh here we go with the official thing again.
They probably wouldn’t be allowed to use the sacred word itself, no, but everyone’s getting around that by using ‘wp’ these days. I’d like to see them try to trademark that.
I see on wp-hackers that ‘a few folks seem to have already moved to another channel’ (Matt gets in a dig about their ‘maturity’).
Ah, the alternate support forums. Done before, never works out.
i love that he says the whole thing has to go through freenode.
because he’s to cheap/lazy/has-no-respect-for-anyone-using-wordpress to bother setting up an IRC server on wordpress.org.
that, you know, used people’s forum accounts, and pulled moderator stats from that.
Matt doesn’t care about IRC, and therefore doesn’t think anyone else should care about it either. I completely see why he doesn’t care about IRC or think it worth spending time on, but in that case he shouldn’t have set up the channel in the first place. The best thing he could do now is hand over the reins to the new ops and let them do whatever they want with it.
I do care about IRC.
Running our own IRC server would actually be a huge hassle, and is prohibited by the datacenters where our servers are located.
Several days ago this was all resolved anyway. If you’re going to wank, stay up to date.
Way to make a mountain out of a molehill…
I was there the day that happened (cause I’m somewhat of a regular there) and magically nothing happened to me.
In fact, I was one of the people who told this kid “just /ignore them”.
What a pussy.
See, you’re probably one of the reasons I assume #wordpress is a crap-filled beargarden and never spend any time there. If people are getting abuse for even complaining about trolls, I’m not surprised they want ops to help maintain a basic level of civility.
People arent getting abuse, just this one guy.
And its not like there’s trolls in there every day causing flame war after flame war, it was this isolated event.
As for me, I mostly just idle nowadays.
yeah. isolated.
Odd how there’s no log for that meetup. Matt’s really touchy about this IRC stuff, isn’t he? I haven’t seen him in such a hurry to move on from a subject since Spamgate.
Wow, this is an old post, but I just found your site. Good stuff. I’ve been looking for a place to vent my WP frustrations.
The last time I was in #wordpress, which was about a month ago, it was in complete shambles. Just total anarchy. People coming in trying to get help were being drowned out by the stupidity of a dozen or so trolls that decided to call #wordpress their home.
When someone does manage to track down Matt to get some assistance, he just shrugs his shoulders. “Stop PMing me about these things. Deal with it.”
In my opinion, an IRC channel (specially one as big and popular as #wordpress) without ops is like a liquor store with no doors or windows, with no one working there, in the middle of the meanest parts of NY, and 3:00 in the morning. You’re gonna have anarchy. No doubt.