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IRC/Publicly logged channels

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Some wikimedia irc channels (especially the important channels where important decisions may be discussed, like #wikimedia-techconnect or #wikimedia-officeconnect) are publicly logged. This page documents the logging processes and information how to access these logs and how to set up public logging.

There are several methods how to log a discussion. You can either do that by hand by copy pasting the discussion from the channel and then posting it to some public place (please note that a number of wikimedia channels forbid public logging, such as #wikipedia-enconnect, so please do not publish logs of these channels), or you can use some free service to log channel for you. Most publicly logged wikimedia channels are logged using wm-bot, which is a free service maintained by volunteers and hosted by Wikimedia Cloud Services.

WM-Bot logs

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Raw text logs

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wm-bot stores logs in several formats, the oldest format is a raw text, which is stored in separate text file for each day. These logs can be found at https://wm-bot.wmcloud.org/logs/

Note the root folder that contains the logs has many more channels than bot is actually logging. Basically, the bot creates a folder for every channel it is ever invited to, no matter if logging is enabled or not. Most of the folders are empty. If you want to see which channels are publicly logged, you can open this page https://wm-bot.wmcloud.org/dump/systemdata.htm where you can see list of all channels the bot is in. Every channel with logs: True option is publicly logged.

Tips public log in text format can be easily downloaded. Every folder contains a tar.gz file which contains all public logs. It is also possible to download a tarball of all public logs of all channels.

Log viewer

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There is an utility on Toolforge called Wikimedia IRC logs browser, that can be found at https://wm-bot.wmcloud.org/browser/

This browser allow you to display logs from any channel you pick from its menu, for selected time range. These logs are in HTML and contain IRC formatting. It is also possible to render these logs in a wikitext for easy posting on a wiki.

Enabling public logging

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In case you want to enable public logging on some another channel, please follow this guide:

  • Ensure that public logging is allowed on the channel. If you aren't sure, please contact the channel operators and ask them.
  • If you have a wikimedia cloak, you can join #wm-botconnect and bring the bot into channel by typing @add #name in there. If you don't, you can ask someone in that channel for help.
  • Enable public logging by typing @logon in a channel which you want to publicly log. Bot should respond with "Channel is now logged". Since that moment, public logs will be generated.

For more information on wm-bot see it's documentation page: wm-bot

Suppressing informations from public logs

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It happens that sometimes you say stuff that you didn't want to have logged. For example, you post your bank account to a logged channel and you are afraid that people start sending insane amounts of money to your account and you would become rich and fat. In that case, it's possible to request the information from public logs to be suppressed. That is a very trivial operation that can be done by any bot operator. The best place to request suppression at is #wikimedia-cloudsconnect (or #wikimedia-techconnect, #wm-botconnect in case nobody respond to you in -clouds). We don't need to know what you said in order to identify what to remove, so avoid repeating it, especially since all these channels you can ask for help in are also publicly logged :-). All what is needed, to identify what needs to be removed, is time, nickname and channel. Bellow is a list of known bot operators who can help you:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Publicly_logged_channels
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