[jfindley]

Yes, I agree. Lots(most?) of channels on freenode are explicitly not publicly logged anywhere, and the freenode staff are pretty helpful at helping chanops enforce this. None of the channels I help run have any public logs available.

[shric]

Perhaps a naive question, but how do chanops enforce this? What's to stop someone lurking in a channel and publishing a log. You can't obviously connect an individual lurker to a log and busy channels have dozens of 24/7 clients connected.

[paranoidrobot]

> You can't obviously connect an individual lurker to a log

I don't think that's necessarily true.

While I don't know if the IRC Server software supports it, there's no reason you couldn't encode some kind of unique tag into the stream of IRC messages sent to each client. Unless you were running two clients and diffing their logs you wouldn't notice.

It could be as simple as seeing additional events, or modified whois/client information on join/leave, or even completely fake client join/leaves.

[293984j29384]

Yeah, that's not a real thing. You can't connect an individual lurker to a log.

[paranoidrobot]

What about what I said isn't possible?

If you control the IRC server, there's nothing stopping you from modifying the events sent to every client in a way that lets you identify that client.