Intermezzo: betrayal and backstabbery
News ·Wednesday December 27, 2006 @ 10:11 EST (link)
While all this was going on with the house, there was some drama in the EFnet #c++ talk channel. Channels such as this have channel operators, or "ops", who maintain order in the channel; usually "op" status is given to experienced users with domain knowledge; evidently someone screwed up in this case. "ZorbaTHut" (an IRC nickname; on EFnet, nicknames are limited to 9 characters) and a few other disgruntled #c++ ops waited until they knew most of us would be away (for example, Lisa was out visiting her dying grandmother) and then took over the channel in mid-December, ejecting most of the other operators.
ZorbaTHut ("Zorba")'s betrayal was a spoiled child's tantrum; the act of an infant who wants to rule the sandbox, throwing feces at anyone who disagrees with him. I believe the main issue that caused him to attempt this takeover was the rejection of his badly-coded 'bot (automaton for information retrieval), which I ended up cleaning up (essentially a rewrite) and which had been installed in the channel. (As an aside: Zorba apparently used to work for Google, but one questions their interviewing standards if that code is typical; he'd have a much harder time getting a job as a Microsoft Office developer. He "quit" to start his own company, without funds or much of a plan.) I have logged a later (January 4) discussion about the takeover; here are some salient quotes:
<ZorbaTHut> symmetry, sorta, yeah. the current admins got tired of the previous admins. that's why we have notabot, not calcme :)
<ZorbaTHut> (and why it uses my codebase :P)
<czth_> if you'd've been brought up proper you'd've learned "thou shalt not steal"
<czth_> yeah, your stinking full-o-crap codebase
<_Stinger_> who was overthrown?
<czth> most of the existing ops, it seems
<ZorbaTHut> stinger, basically raph and mind, with a little collateral damage
<czth> the honorable thing to do would have been to step down as op, of course, rather than backstabbing the rest of us.
<xor_mind-> Where you abusing your power or something? Why have not been reopped czth?
<czth> xor_mind-: because i know some of the people zorba doesn't like
<czth> boy, that sounds really mature when it's put that way, doesn't it zorba me lad?
<czth> never have i abused ops
<ScratXP> do you need ops
<czth> do you need Internet connectivity?
<jey> czth: I agree that it sucks in your position
I think jey summed it up nicely, although he's part of the Vichy regimeproblem, rather than being part of the solution. Anyway: some Internet politics for y'all to enjoy.
