DoTheNeedful is an IRC bot that runs in the #reddit-sysadmin channel on the Libera.Chat IRC Network.
Serving as the official IRC channel for the r/sysadmin subreddit, the IRC channel began in 2011 on another IRC network. In 2021, the channel was moved to Libera.Chat. Shortly after founding, and in the years since, the current ops team was established and is as follows:
Please message one of the ops directly on the channel if you have any questions or concerns: /msg [op] I have a question/concern...
The bot was authored by mistiry and is actively maintained and (hopefully) improved. There are plans in the future to release the code behind the bot, which is written using procedural PHP and backed with a MariaDB database running on CentOS 7.8
Backups are being taken every-other-day, but in the very near future will be expanded and improved, with several copies and off-site replication to do our best to ensure none of the user data is lost (as we've seen happen before!).
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:
#libera-cloak and type !cloakme if nothing else.
"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.