Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-1370845-20141107202502/@comment-4242472-20141107215500

I am largely opposed to this suggestion as I see this as a situation that could have been and can be avoided with responsible behaviour. Any tool as powerful as an archive can be abused simply by not using it responsibly. And as some other users may have pointed out, restricting access may be worse.

One of the possible issues with everyone keeping personal records is what prevents certain users from modifying the logs to suit their arguments? With a public log we can verify what was said wheras with a private log there's no real way of knowing unless more than one person has a record of the event. Restricting the logs to admins and bureaucrats may potentially be just a bad as it conflicts with this notion of an admin being a regular user with a few extra buttons; with a restricted archive system admins are "regular users with a few extra buttons and unrestricted access to the public chat archives", that's a significantly larger set of privealges than what admins have now which gives me concern it may cause further problems i nthe long run.

I also think a publicly available archive can make us appear more open as a community and gives reason for people to not gossip publicly as a couple of prior incidents have proved that just because a particular user isn't on the IRC does not mean they will be oblivious to what you are saying about them.

Regarding the Infobot, yes it used to be an issue but I haven't seen a major incident with it in a while so for now i'd say its safe to assume that the Infobot Abuse Crisis has passed and everyone has gotten more mature and responsible about using it. THe only real useage of it these days is with ~test, but I'd consider the frequency of it to be unobtrusive.