notifications are too noisy in #tor-admin and tor-puppet email

We get way too much noise in #tor-admin from the webhook bot.

Steps to reproduce

  1. be in the channel
  2. look at it
  3. just look at it
  4. can you see anything?
  5. no me neither
  6. why is that?
  7. well there's just too much noise!
  8. what?
  9. THERE'S TOO MUCH NOISE!
  10. WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU THERE'S TOO MUCH NOISE?

What is the current bug behavior?

THERE'S TOO MUCH NOISE!

ahem.

those are the people who spoke in the channel, by number of lines:

> sed -n 's/.*<//;s/>.*//p' log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
      1 brizental[mds]
      1 GitLabTPAbot[mds]
      2 hiro
      8 lavamind
     19 anarcat

and here are the bots:

> sed -n 's/[0-9:]* -//;s/:#tor-admin.*//p' log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
      1 GitLabTPAbot[mds]
      2 zwiebelbot
     29 KGB-TPA

IT IS SPEAKING MORE THAN I AM THAT IS WRONG.

out of those 29 messages, we find, but number of occurences

  • 14 issue updates
  • 4 MR updates
  • 3 new MR
  • 2 commits
  • 2 new issue
  • 1 closed issue
  • 1 reopened issue
  • 1 closed MR
  • -1 line counted in double above (the list adds up to 30 instead of 29, i'm not counting this by hand again)

What is the expected correct behavior?

If anyone should be speaking more than anyone, I should.

The bot should be more quiet.

When did this start?

This has been going on forever, but has been more of a problem as the team and our workload grew.

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

the data above was extracted from this log:

Click to expand 
02:15:07 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42550 Hiro Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550
02:15:12 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42550 Hiro Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550
02:18:46 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42554 Hiro Run podman on colchicifolium * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42554
02:19:54 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42550 Hiro Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550
02:20:00 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42550 Hiro Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550
          02:56 | Joins: ma1, el3ctron, shelikhoo, shelikhoow ── Quits: shelikhoow_, shelikhoo_ | 05:31
06:46:19 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production groente * [open] merge request !196: setting tls protocols and cipher suites for puppetserver, see ADR0105 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/196
06:53:11 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production tpa-git-bot * [update] merge request !196: setting tls protocols and cipher suites for puppetserver, see ADR0105 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/196
07:08:04 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production tpa-git-bot * [update] merge request !196: setting tls protocols and cipher suites for puppetserver, see ADR0105 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/196
07:09:21 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42555 Georg Koppen Replace GeKo with hiro on security@torproject.org * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42555
07:11:32 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #32351 groente review our ssl ciphers suite * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/32351
          07:32 | Joins: morganava ── Nicks: morganava → Guest5800 | 08:05
08:07:35 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production groente * [open] merge request !197: set gnutls priority for mandos, see ADR0105 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/197
          08:29 | Joins: morganava ── Quits: Guest5800, Guest5802 ── Nicks: morganava → Guest5802 | 08:35
08:59:23 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production groente * [close] merge request !197: set gnutls priority for mandos, see ADR0105 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/197
09:00:19 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #32351 groente review our ssl ciphers suite * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/32351
09:28:52 <anarcat> lavamind: do you know the answer to brizental[mds]'s question off hand?
09:32:28 <brizental[mds]> i think its 4mb, i'm wondering if we can raise it
09:40:51 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production anarcat * [approved] merge request !196: setting tls protocols and cipher suites for puppetserver, see ADR0105 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/196
09:41:59 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42555 anarcat Replace GeKo with hiro on security@torproject.org * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42555
09:42:17 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42555 anarcat Replace GeKo with hiro on security@torproject.org * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42555
09:42:49 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42550 anarcat Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550
09:43:33 <anarcat> lavamind: can you take the pair of issues for hiro about colchicifolium? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550 (move the service to systemd --user) and https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42554 (transition to podman)?
09:43:34 -zwiebelbot:#tor-admin- tor:tpo/tpa/team#42550: Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure - https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/42550
09:43:35 -zwiebelbot:#tor-admin- tor:tpo/tpa/team#42554: Run podman on colchicifolium - https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/42554
          09:43 | Quits: el3ctron
09:55:44 <lavamind> anarcat: i don't know offhand, i can check
09:57:15 <anarcat> thanks
10:24:11 <lavamind> hiro: afaict we haven't changed the default limit, which is 100mb
10:24:49 <anarcat> lavamind: i think you meant brizental[mds] there no?
10:24:53 <lavamind> it's possible for external runners like those hosted by osuosl to limit this, however, but I don't know if they do
10:25:00 <hiro> ah ok
10:25:00 <lavamind> oh yeah sorry
10:25:08 <hiro> I was wondering which limit that was lol
10:25:22 <lavamind> hiro: i was also reading your ticket just before heh
          10:25 | Quits: ma1
10:25:26 <lavamind> about podman
          10:25 | Joins: ma1
10:25:58 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42554 Jérôme Charaoui Run podman on colchicifolium * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42554
10:26:00 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42554 Jérôme Charaoui Run podman on colchicifolium * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42554
10:26:59 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #41643 anarcat High availability Prometheus monitoring * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41643
10:27:05 <anarcat> noisy noisy noise noise
10:27:09 <anarcat> i think today i'll turn off that noise
10:28:44 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42553 anarcat Off-boarding leaving Community Council members (2026) * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42553
10:30:05 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42552 anarcat On-boarding new Community Council members (2026) * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42552
10:31:11 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #32351 groente review our ssl ciphers suite * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/32351
10:31:42 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- prometheus-alerts main anarcat * [open] merge request !89: ignore 404 errors on donate * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/-/merge_requests/89
10:32:27 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- prometheus-alerts main anarcat * [update] merge request !89: ignore 404 errors on donate * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/-/merge_requests/89
10:34:20 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- tor-puppet production 2f158c5 groente data/common/ciphers.yaml site/profile/manifests/puppet/server.pp setting tls protocols and cipher suites for puppetserver, see ADR0105
10:35:41 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- TPA team issues #42550 anarcat Restart collector service on colchicifolium on failure * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42550
10:35:49 <anarcat> lavamind: i've reassigned you the latter as well
10:49:47 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- puppet-control production groente * [close] merge request !191: implementing adr0105 for apache websites * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/puppet-control/-/merge_requests/191
10:51:10 -KGB-TPA:#tor-admin- tor-puppet production 9851e53 groente data/common/ciphers.yaml clarify that we have separate cipher suites for java
          10:52 | Joins: GitLabTPAbot[mds]
10:53:30 <GitLabTPAbot[mds]> test test this is anarcat testing a matrix bot again
10:53:45 -GitLabTPAbot[mds]:#tor-admin- anarcat pushed to branch [main](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/commits/main) of [The Tor Project / TPA / TPA team](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team) ([Compare 
          changes](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/compare/b1ef4ee7984dd39c43d3c4912f251ee40868e38f...e9673ab0f988f93fb4acad6edadafe8be8e12983))
10:53:56 <anarcat> ok, so here's my suggestion for this channel
10:54:01 <anarcat> let's switch to a matrix bot.
10:54:18 <anarcat> the webhook integration doesn't discriminate between created and updated issues, and we get a *lot* of noise about updated issues
10:54:42 <anarcat> the matrix "integration" seems more intelligent int hat regard, so i'm going to turn off the webhook for tpo/tpa/team for now and try the integration for a day and see what it looks like
10:55:04 <anarcat> deleted the webhook
10:55:14 <anarcat> will now go back to my regular "haaa lots of issues and email" routine
11:01:03 <lavamind> very happy about this https://rt.torproject.org/Transaction/Display.html?id=3492624
11:01:26 <lavamind> user had problem with captcha, tried again and it worked
11:01:51 <anarcat> lavamind: that is huge!
11:01:54 <anarcat> congratulations
11:02:04 <anarcat> we haven't heard progress like this on donate's forms for a while :)
11:02:50 <anarcat> so two issues have been updated and this room is silent, which is pretty awesome, if you ask me
11:03:14 <anarcat> the markdown formatting doesn't look great on IRC, but it does look pretty awesome on matrix, i gotta say
11:03:35 <anarcat> and it kind of degrades okay on irc too: at least i can open the links easily in my terminal myself

Possible fixes

i think it might be possible to reduce the noise somehow. perhaps the webhook handler could filter out issue updates?