date: 2007-08-26 19:20:55+00:00
slug: cia-bots-the-instant-version-control-informants-an-annoyance
title: CIA Bots - 'The Instant Version Control Informants' -- an annoyance?
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While most FOSS contributors will be familiar with [CIA](http://cia.vc) and likely to utilize it for tracking commits for their project(s) and contributors, we occasionally have concerns raised from projects who find that CIA-* joined their channel unexpectedly and not on their request, this may be because someone typoed a channel name when setting things up over at the CIA page, or because someone decided to be helpful and share the joys of CIA with a new project/channel but forgot to ask the project admins/channel owners whether this would be a-ok.. and occasionally we find ourselves getting a bunch of notices alerting us to a CIA-* bot as a potential spambot as it tries rejoin a channel from which it has been banned, or when its been misconfigured and cycle a channel which has a forward set (this tends to confuse most bots!).
While freenode encourage and welcome the use of CIA-* bots on our servers, finding it to be a great tool for the wider FOSS communities, tracking thousands of concurrent projects and contributors at any given time we also acknowledge that it may be annoying to have a uninvited CIA-* bot join your channel.
projects / irc / freenode / web-7.0.git / blobdiff