Epilogue

Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>

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+---
+name: Epilogue
+date: 2021-05-26
+tags:
+ - freenode
+ - irc
+---
+
+# Epilogue
+
+The last caretaker's absence rippled throughout the halls. The darkness was all
+that remained.
+
+---
+
+I used to run an IRC network named PonyChat. It was an IRC network aimed at
+adult fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Looking back, working on that
+network was probably the biggest catalyst to my learning how to do system
+administration to the level I am at today.
+
+Lots of stuff goes wrong when you run an IRC network. PonyChat peaked at around
+500 users on average, but that didn't stop things from being interesting. There
+were several "groups" of people there, and a lot of roleplaying channels. As
+things like Discord picked up more and more users, a lot of the roleplaying
+channels were all that were left at the end. There were some people in the #geek
+room that were near permanent fixtures. Talking with those people and
+collaborating on various projects is how I learned the skills that I use daily
+for remote work.
+
+---
+
+The darkness was confused. It didn't expect this to happen. The discussion halls
+were so full of life before! There were so many people from as many backgrounds
+talking about anything you could imagine!
+
+But the people left. The darkness didn't totally see why this happened, but then
+they walked the halls and saw some things around the empty rooms.
+
+```
+The official Arch Linux support channels have moved to libera.chat, good luck!
+```
+
+The previous moderators of the discussion forum had apparently left up signs
+telling anyone who hadn't walked over with them to tell them where to go. The
+darkness looked around and saw more and more of those signs.
+
+_Without those signs, they won't know where to go! If we can remove all of those
+signs then maybe the people will be active again!_
+
+> This channel has moved to ##archlinux. The topic is in violation of freenode
+> policy.
+
+_Perfect_, the darkness thought to themselves. _They can't leave now, those
+signs were telling them where to go!_
+
+---
+
+When things came to an end with PonyChat, I had a big choice to make. There's
+two main ways for chat communities to die: fast and slow. The fast ways are
+quicker, less painful for users and potentially harsh for people that didn't get
+the memo in time. The slow way gets expensive and soul-draining.
+
+I was the last caretaker left on PonyChat after the attrition rate affected the
+staff as well as the users. I was the only person really active on the network
+and a lot of it was held together with increasingly brittle lua scripts.
+
+It was soul-crushing. PonyChat was close to my heart. Writing the bots that
+ended up being the core of the anti-spam engine were some of my first coding
+projects.
+
+---
+
+The darkness was disturbed from their laurels by one of their caretakers.
+Apparently this angered the people who had left. The former community scribes
+were furious. The last caretakers had never done such a thing. Notices to those
+communities were always left intact. The mere _thought_ of doing such a thing
+was _unthinkable_.
+
+Yet it happened. The darkness realized that they messed up. Quickly, a change
+was made. _It can't be against policy if there's a policy allowing it!
+Historical precedent be damned, this is advertisement! They are promoting
+another place instead of here! Here is perfectly good!_ They thought.
+
+The darkness smiled its spiral smile and spread to take down more signs with a
+golem purpose made to print off new signs.
+
+> This channel has moved to ##botters. The topic is in violation of freenode
+> policy.
+
+The golem blindly continued manufacturing out new signs. The silent masses left
+behind watched in horror as they were forced out of their former haunts.
+
+---
+
+There's something kind of magical about writing an IRC chatbot. It's one of the
+few kinds of things you can create that you create in public. Even if the source
+code isn't shared you still need to test it somewhere. You build it in public.
+
+Anti-spam bots are a similar kind of thing. Unfortunately they form a kind of
+arms race. It's much easier to make new spam than it is to come up with patterns
+for existing spam. Writing one is soul-crushing. You have to quickly develop a
+kind of reputation system or you will immediately turn it into a way to ban your
+own users. A lot of the more clever trolls tricked users into typing the phrases
+that got them banned.
+
+Then there was the doxxing and swatting.
+
+---
+
+The darkness walked through the halls and smiled. All those signs were gone.
+They peered into a room to see what was happening. They saw nothing. There
+weren't even the silent masses that had normally huddled around the backs of
+rooms. Some of those people had sat there for years doing nothing but listening.
+Nobody really knew if they were actually paying attention or not, some may not
+even be alive anymore, but they were haunting those rooms either way.
+
+The signs pointed people elsewhere. Those who had stayed in the background
+didn't get the memo. They were stuck there. Just sitting there and watching. Not
+really doing anything, just watching and listening.
+
+---
+
+If you run an IRC network of any appreciable scale, be prepared for these
+eventualities:
+
+Your real name, email address, facebook account link, twitter account link,
+phone number, parents names, mailing address, physical address and sometimes
+even tax identification numbers will be leaked to the public. You **MUST** use
+a password manager and two-factor auth everywhere. Register your domains under a
+past or fake address. That will prevent people from getting your mailing address
+as easily.
+
+I've been doxxed so many times that I have given up trying to keep my things
+separate. A lot of the places you see me using different names started out as my
+attempts to use separate handles in different places. I have kept them the same
+for consistency but I have largely given up trying to keep them separate. It is
+a lot of work and I bet that even if I went back on the hyper private sthick (if
+I even can at this point, I've been frontpaged on Orange Site and my blog gets
+so much traffic that it's probably impossible in practice without abandoning my
+handles and picking new ones).
+
+Your staff will lose interest and abandon the project one day without telling
+you. They may end up still being connected there, but just as an idle bouncer.
+It's akin to a zombie laying in the background.
+
+Call your local police non-emergency number and set up a standing order to call
+you before they send in a SWAT team to your house. There are people that will
+seriously call the cops and claim you're armed and dangerous to get a SWAT team
+to ruin your life or potentially get you killed. This is not a joke. It's nearly
+happened to me thrice. I got that call from the cops once. It is not a good
+feeling.
+
+You need to use something with a powerful and easy to use spambot or message
+filtering built into the server itself. This will save your ass some day.
+
+---
+
+The former moderators of the rooms that were closed off came back with
+pitchforks and torches. They were **pissed**. The rooms they had tended to for
+years were suddenly stolen from them. Yes, they were abandoned, but the
+precedent for doing such a thing had never really existed before. It was such a
+tiny thing, but they had to go out of their way to make that golem. They had to
+tell the golem what to do. They had to send out that golem.
+
+Several groups were on the fence with regards of what to do, but that golem made
+the choice for them. Some groups even wanted _to stay at the same meeting house_
+but the golem came in and closed their hall without warning.
+
+---
+
+The day I killed PonyChat was a hard day for me. I had planned it 3 months ago.
+Warnings were issued. I helped bigger communities move elsewhere. Everything was
+spinning down.
+
+Then the time came and I ran the script that only needed to be run once:
+
+```
+$ ./scripts/kill_ponychat.sh
+```
+
+A progress bar appeared and with it all of what was created over the last decade
+was destroyed. Backups were erased. Data was wiped. Servers were destroyed. DNS
+records were altered. And finally it printed this:
+
+```
+It's okay to cry.
+```
+
+And that was the end of it.
+
+---
+
+If the halls were empty before, they were desolate now. Everything was being
+abandoned in real time. Announcements were made about how the golem was
+premature and that people should really consider staying. It was no use. The
+golem had made up their minds.
+
+The rot started.
+
+---
+
+Author's Note: I really hope this is the last entry in this little speculative
+fiction/postmortem/retrospective series. I have an article in the pipeline on
+how I'm creating virtual machines from templates so that I can test how various
+versions of various distros work, but this freenode bullshit has eaten up a lot
+of my thinking time. It's been like watching a train wreck. You can't look at
+it, but you can't look away either. It's so hard to watch yet you just can't
+help but watch it.
+
+It hurts.
+
+This was not on my bingo card for 2021.