We have added a new bot (IRSeekBot2) to take the load off IRseekBot (It appears that due to excessive traffic, the server kept disconnecting IRSeekBot with Excess-Floor errors).

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your support.

We have received several contacts from people reporting that our bot has been re-connecting again and again. In order to avoid any further inconveniences, we have temporarily disabled the bots until the issue is resolved.

We apologize for any inconvenience this network disruption might have caused.

We are happy to announce that following changes to our service, we are bringing the service back online.  You can learn about the changes at our new policies page available from our home-page.

Please note that following the concerns voiced by many IRC users we have removed the majority of our content.  We are hoping to bring a lot of content back as soon as we get an approval for it, together with a lot of new content.
 
Please help us bring the wonderful content available on IRC to the entire internet community by encouraging your channel operators to opt-in to our service.
 
Thanks,
The IRSeek Team.

Based on the feedback we have received from the community, we have changed our service to meet the concerns of many IRC users. It is clear that the support of the community is paramount. We have decided to remove all logs that had been archived prior to IRSeek’s recent changes. We have started to archive new content with the approval of the respective network and channel operators.

The following changes have been applied based on suggestions and requests from IRC operators and users:

1. Our service now supports both opt-in and opt-out policies. For example, we apply an opt-in policy with the Freenode network and an opt-out policy for the OSX86 network. The policy is chosen by the network’s operators.

2. The logging bots will be easily identifiable, both by nickname and ‘whois’ information.

3. Individual channel operators, when properly identified, will be able to opt-in or opt-out based on the policy agreed upon with the respective IRC network.

Following many comments and contacts by users, we are publishing a list of questions and answers to frequently asked questions or misunderstandings:

Q. What is your motivation behind IRSeek?
A. We believe that there’s a lot of useful information flowing on IRC that is not available to the majority of the users on the Internet. We are building a platform that would change this situation and make this wonderful information widely available to everybody. In a sense, we are creating a knowledge-base different from any other today.

Q. Why not use Opt-in only?
A. We are still considering this alternative and discussing its implications with the community.

Q. Why aren’t you stopping the service until an acceptable solution is found?
A. We have stopped the search functionality and all our bots on December 2nd at about 12:00 UTC.

Q. Why have you used TOR, what are you trying to hide?
A. The reason we’ve used TOR is simply to avoid the IP address limitation on the servers. In retrospect, it was a hasty decision. We should have asked the IRC operators to relax that limitation.

Q. A lot of people have been using various analogies to describe what - in their POV - is the equivalent of IRSeek in the real-life. These include recording conversations in shopping malls, pubs, work/school canteen, ball-rooms, houses, buses, trains, clubs, investigation-rooms and public-parks. What do you think is a proper analogy?
A. We find it somewhat difficult to compare a real-life situation to a chat-room on the net, but we think that the public-park (e.g. hyde-park, Speaker’s corner) analogy is the most appropriate one. People come to the park (public-channel) to be heard (send messages to the channel) and listen to others, anyone can join and leave the park (public-chat room), and you may not know who the people listening/talking are (nicknames on IRC).

Q. Some users have shown concerns that IRSeek may be used to stalk on people on IRC. What is your stand on that?
A. We believe that people whom are interested in stalking others can do it with or without IRSeek. For example, by simply joining a public channel, they can record and archive what is being said in that channel. Furthermore, IRSeek does not log anything except the nickname and the public-message to the channel (no IP addresses, real-names or full-names are logged) so staking to a nickname (that you can’t be sure who is actually behind it) does not seem a major concern to us.

Q. Can you please remove my conversations from your database?
A. Individuals who do not want their nicknames or channels (if they are the contacts - or operators - for that channel) archived (or in our database) will not be archived, and will be removed from our database (essentially an Opt-out feature).

Q. Can you please add our public-channel(s) to your service?
A. We are currently discussing possible solutions with several IRC community leaders and will be happy to add your channel(s) to our service when the issues at hand are resolved.

Q. Can you please anonymize my nick, or please make sure not to anonymize our nicks.
A. We are modifying our system to include an opt-anonymize for every channel. It will be up to the channel contact (or operator) to decide whether to anonymize the nicks in that channel or not.

Q. User’s nick anonymizing is not 100%, sometimes people are writing private information to the channel. How do you address that concern?
A. True, the nick anonymization process is not always perfect. For example, if a person addresses another nickname on the channel with a typo (e.g. addressing “superman” by “supermam”) the process may fail to work properly. The anonymization process is meant to add *another* layer of privacy to the users on the channel, and in the vast majority of cases it does.

Q. Why not let people in the public-channels know you are logging the conversation in that channel?
A. One of the considered adjustments to our service is exactly that.

Following contacts from several IRC operators, the following response E-mail has been sent to clarify IRSeek’s position:

–

In the past couple of days we’ve been contacted by many people, some supportive and appreciative, some surprised and concerned.

Due to the concerns of our users, we’ve decided that for the time being, until we figure out a satisfactory solution(s) to the user’s concerns, we have disabled the site.

Our bots have been designed to be non-intrusive and to only archive public channels, if we accidentally archived private or secret channels, it has been without our intent, and the content of these channels will be removed from our database. The purpose of IRSeek is to archive public chats that would be of interest to the entire Internet community.

Regarding awareness of the operators and users in the channels: we were under the impression that users in public chat-rooms are aware that their conversations are, by definition, public. Since people are allowed to go in and out of such channels, and anyone could be logging (and most likely automatically logging the conversations in their own IRC client) the channels, it will come as no surprise to users that their chats are available on the web. Also, we assume you are aware of the fact that IRSeek is not the first entity to place IRC logs on the web, and most likely not the last one to do it (ignoring the possibility that chat logs may be stored by others, and not made available to the entire community). We think that users/operators who believe that their discussions on public channels on IRC are private (except their IP, realname, fullname, nickname) are under a serious misconception, with-or-without IRSeek. With that, we read the responses of our users and realize that some are definitely concerned. Therefore, we are looking for ways to mitigate their concerns and find better ways to run our service.

It’s important to note that a lot of users contacted us and showed their support and appreciation of our service, and in many cases asked that we archive and index their channels.

At the present time, we are considering several approaches that have been suggested by users and by our advisers:

1. Do our best to anonymize the nicknames.
2. Allow channel operators to opt-out (by verifying their identity on IRC).
3. Make sure our bots only archive public channels that haven’t opted-out.
4. Make our bots detectable by nickname together with a link to our policies.
5. Better explain our policies on the website.
6. Do not index nicknames.

We would be happy to discuss this further with you and hear any suggestions you might have to making this service more acceptable to users and at the same time allowing users that are not familiar with IRC to learn about it and enjoy this wonderful knowledge base.

At the same time, we would seek the blessing of IRC operators in order to allow us to continue providing our service.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts about the matter.

Thanks,
Ariel and Eran.
B&C Advanced Solutions LTD.

Following the item posted on TechCrunch’s website, we have received hundreds of e-mails from people who support our activities and people whom are surprised and concerned about the privacy implications of our service.
As of 12:00 (UTC) IRSeek management decided to temporarily suspend all search options on IRSeek in order to find a satisfactory solution to the user’s concerns.