A beautiful kline

There is an ops meeting next week in #wikimedia-ops on freenode. I'd suggest as many people attend it as possible, if not just to see what they have to say about the current issues, so that they can paste to me a bloody log. I won't be there unless my kline is redacted, but I would be very interested to see what they have to say for incidents like this, which until this point I didn't fully believe were abusive or necessarily related to power hunger at all. Well done, Christel, you have convinced me that I was wrong. Have a medal.

So it goes down like this. Roux is not too happy with the way the ops have been acting as of recent, and the rest of the channel (sans Ryan, the only op responding to what he was saying at the time) agrees with Roux that something must be done. Basically, regulars have been getting gunned down because they call a spade a spade when they see a blatant troll in a channel. We are nice guys, we are tolerant and the rest, but most of the IRC regulars don't expect to put up with bullshit from trolls - and even less should they have to expect that they are directed against because they have called a spade a spade. I won't mention the name of the user at hand, and I wasn't there when the alleged incident which caused the conversation actually happened, but I have seen plenty of trolls in freenode, especially in #wikipedia-en-help, and a lot of the time the people that have ended up being sanctioned or 'talked to' by the ops have been the regulars - the people who try and keep the channel under control, who aren't afraid to say stop when something is wrong (this goes for most of the regulars, although admittedly not all). This conversation was going on in #wikipedia-en, which was probably not the most appropriate place for the discussion, but either way, it did not warrant a %+b (quiet) without any warning for Roux, who was expressing a valid point. Now, up until this point there had been about five or six people defending roux and concurring with his core points, myself included. I don't think anyone in channel agreed with the quiet, or at least, nobody who wished to defended it spoke out if it, but there were a lot of vocal critics - again, myself included.

So, we went into #wikimedia-ops to contest the +q. This conversation was getting somewhere (except between Martin's and Roux's definitions of 'calm'). Basically, Roux was asking to be dequieted from -en, and Martin was saying that he wanted to see evidence that Roux was calm before doing so. Fair enough. The conversation was all about powerhungry and rude ops (of which there are a good few), which is ironic, considering what happened next.

Roux was then told by Christel that she would have in fact banned him by this point. Saying "well I would have done it like this" was not, and is not a constructive comment to make, especially when things are being resolved. Noting that all this comment would serve to do would be to inflame an already large issue, I told Christel that her comment was unconstructive. She then told me in response that I was "asking for one [a ban]", and I was subsequently klined.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think a kline was not only unwarranted, it was downright abusive and rude - especially with a block reason as untrue as "please do not harass channels or users on freenode".

As an aside, I have found, just by typing "site:pastebin.ca klines@freenode.net" into google, more evidence of unwarranted klining by Christel - right here.

So yes, attend that ops meeting. It's on the 23rd. Be there, and see what they have to say.