While I was in the process of editing this article my good friend and co-founder Max Ogden told me he had just been asked to take down http://archive.couchdb.org, an IRC log and search utility he wrote for the IRC and Mailing List messages of the CouchDB project. [strike]It's unclear which esoteric Apache rule this tool violates, other than being useful and not being hosting at Apache, but[strike] he was told it's a "privacy violation" which is odd considering it only logs public IRC and Mailing List messages.
[Update] It has been clarified that the request to take down archive.couchdb.org was made by an ASF committer, possibly with the support of other #couchdb users, but is not a violation of ASF rules and the request was made on their own behalf and not the ASF. The only policy that has been metioned is the freenode guidlines which caution against logging but do not ban it outright.
I am happy to clarify that the person who requested this was me. The log archive that Max put up went back about a year. Anyone who chatted in the channel during that time was unaware that it was being logged, and so it is a violation of Freenode's guidelines, and indeed common decency, to publish these logs. As the official Group Contact for the channel, it is my duty to uphold the channel to the network's policies. I am personally responsible for it.
While the channel is public, it is not published. It's the difference between doing a podcast, and chatting with your friends at the pub. Both are fine, and both are essentially public, but they come with different assumptions about privacy. My request was that we remove the logs until we, as a group of IRC users, can decide what we want. If we decide we want to log the channel, we can put the site back up again, but without any retroactive data. We must also put a permanent notice in the channel topic to warn users that the channel is publicly logged.
Please note, again, that the IRC channel is run by me, personally. In turn, I delegate some of that authority to committers, using channel flags. While it is obviously the de-facto CouchDB channel, it is not run by Apache, and they have no say over how we operate it. Apache's only concern is that we do not make important project decisions on IRC where there is no visibility, and no permanent record. The mailing lists have to be used for that.