Are your channels visible enough?

18th April 2025 by el

Hello!

When setting up Libera Chat, we made several decisions about defaults in the interest of respecting privacy. One of these changes was setting channel mode s on by default for all new channels. Having channel mode s set by default means that a channel is in “secret mode” when it is first created, allowing founders to choose when and if their channels are ready to be publicly promoted to other people. We recognise that not all channels should be public, even in otherwise open and transparent projects.

Naturally, there are consequences to a channel staying a secret. For example, people will not find your project if they use standard channel search utilities to look for topics. That means that if your main channel is secret, your project could be missing out on getting the attention of new users or contributors, and that is a shame.

We have noticed that a number of projects’ main channels have not removed this mode, or perhaps “temporarily” set it back on to avoid being discovered by spam bots that we struggled with in the early months of the network. As we all know, nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix. This brings us to the purpose of this outreach: to encourage you to check that your channels are all set up with the correct level of visibility. To make this process easy, we have just rolled out some helpful features:

• Everyone has access to the new LISTMODES command. Using /msg ChanServ LISTMODES will provide an overview of the current modes and MLOCK for all channels that you have ChanServ privileges in.
• Group Contacts will see a reminder of the secret status for all channels in their namespaces when using the existing /msg ChanServ LISTGROUPCHANS command. (SECRET) is now shown for channels with mode s set.
• Channel founders will now receive a notification at channel registration time that their new channel is currently in secret mode, and how they can change that.

Everyone can help with this, even without privileges in any channels. Most clients let you check what modes a channel has set with /mode, for example /mode #libera. Depending on your client and whether you are currently in the channel, the modes will either be displayed in the channel itself, or in the server window for the network, where the MOTD goes. Politely encouraging the operators of your favorite project channels to check this post will help a lot.

Once any misconfigured channels have been identified, disabling secret mode is easy; simply /mode #yourchannel -s. If the mode change gets reverted, you may also need to update the mode lock, which is configured using /msg ChanServ SET #channel MLOCK [new mode string].

We do understand that you may still have concerns about allowing your channels to be visible again, which is why we have worked hard behind the scenes on a variety of network-level abuse mitigation tools. Our ability to respond to incidents has improved a lot since those exciting early months, and we believe that the rewards of visibility now outweigh the risks.