DoTheNeedful is an implementation of cIRCuitbot serving the #reddit-sysadmin channel on the Libera.Chat IRC Network


About The Channel

Serving as the official IRC channel for the r/sysadmin subreddit since 2010, the IRC channel began on the Freenode IRC network prior to the hostile takeover and subsequent purge of all channel and user registrations from the entire network. After that occurence, the channel was moved to Libera.Chat and has been operating there ever since!

The original channel founder was not active in the community, having registered the name to stake their claim on it but never participating or working to build their new channel. The community was upset at the lack of moderation, features, and overall direction of the channel; this eventually culminated in a channel-wide vote for a new channel operator that was active and capable of managing the growing, but increasingly frustrated, channel.

After the vote, the user cryptic1 was voted in as the new operator. As he started to dive in, he quickly realized that a single active channel operator was not enough to stay on top of everything, and soon the user mistiry, who was 2nd place in the channel vote, was also added as an operator.

From there, with experienced and active operators working to grow the community, the channel exploded in popularity. Additional channel operators were added; the increase in popularity brought users from all over the world, and so new channel operators from various timezones were brought in for extra coverage. There were various bots over the years, and long-time users may even remember a few of them such as Cueanay (a Q&A bot), SavantBot (a karma/voice nomination bot), or GamingChair (a games bot).

Today, the channel remains fairly popular. On Libera, it is by far the most popular channel related to Reddit - by user count, more than all the others combined! Averaging around 330 users in the channel throughout 2023, and many more users participating via the Discord Relay (more on that below), the channel and community remains a place for users all over the globe to chat about technology, security, networking... or more likely using it as an escape from the daily grind of a sysadmin and talking with others that know exactly how they feel!

The Discord Relay

In the channel is a bot named sd, short for "Sysadmin Discord". This bot relays messages between the #reddit-sysadmin channel, and the r/sysadmin Official Discord, and allows users on either platform to communicate together. On the IRC side, users see the Discord messages pre-pended with a stylized Discord username, and on the Discord side each IRC user appears as a unique user, with their IRC nickname, a unique "bot" avatar, and a tag denoting they are an IRC user. This allows for seamless sharing of messages between the two platforms - user tagging even works!

Many features of DoTheNeedful work for Discord users thanks to the relay support built into cIRCuitbot. Check the Bot Help page for more info.

The Current Ops Team

Please message one of the ops directly on the channel if you have any questions or concerns: /msg [op] I have a question/concern...

Privacy Information

One should never assume that data you expose on the public internet and in a public forum is not being collected or monitored. We do collect and store some data. Here is the data that we are collecting:

What data is retained and how

"Seen" Info - Every user the bot sees is logged to a table in a SQL database. The bot creates a unique numerical identifier for each new user, and stores along with that ID the last time that user was seen, the nickname and hostname of the user, the last message seen by the user (including /quit messages), and the "location" the user was last seen - either in the public channel or in PM's with the bot. The data is overwritten every time the bot sees a user do something, so there is only the last-seen data being retained indefinitely; no historical record-keeping of the user's messages is logged to this table.

Quote Data - Users have the ability to add quotes to a database. These quotes are retained forever, at least that is the intention. At this time there is no moderator approval required, so users are free to submit any quotes they wish to the database (with the idea being quotes that occurred during normal channel discourse, and some moderation is applied to keep the database on-topic). While we have the ability to purge quotes, that is only done in extreme cases where it is deemed warranted by the ops team after internal and with-the-complaining-user discussions, outside of regular cleanup of obvious racist, hateful, or otherwise harmful additions.