chattiest-channels

chattiest-channels is a script that analyzes your WeeChat logs to determine which channels have had the most active discussions lately. It does this by filtering out known bots, join/leave messages, channel messages, away indicators, etc. and counts the remaining lines across a given time interval.

By default, it analyzes the last 24-25 hours of logs; however, it can take an optional parameter to specify a custom number of hours to search back.

Try it now, without installing anything:

sh -c "$(curl -sSL 'https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/chattiest-channels/blob/master/chattiest-channels')" - -n 20

Flood mitigation

Mitigating the effects of spam and flooding continues to be an ongoing challenge. Current measures include:

• Merging consecutive messages from the same nick
• Filtering out known bots

Areas of improvement:

• Filtering out messages containing a lot of escape sequences (since these usually aren't part of a discussion)
• Filter out bots on a per-network or per-channel basis to avoid false positives

Dependencies

chattiest-channels is written in POSIX sh and uses only standard POSIX utilities, with one exception: it requires an implementation of date(1) that supports the -d flag to describe an arbitrary date. The versions of date(1) that come with GNU coreutils, BusyBox, FreeBSD, and macOS satisfy this condition.

Usage

Usage: chattiest-channels [options]

analyze your WeeChat IRC logs to find the most active channels.

  -d, --duration <NUM>  Start counting messages from <NUM> hours ago, rounded down
                        to the earliest hour. Defaults to 24.
  -n, --lines    <NUM>  Show only the <NUM> most active channels. Defaults to showing
                        results from all available log files.
  -h, --help            Print this help and exit

Example

Print the top 20 most active channels from the last 48-49 hours.

$ chattiest-channels -n 35 -d 24
channel stats from 2020-04-17 22:00 to 2020-04-18 22:08 PDT
total messages: 29460
chattiest channels:
1.   snoonet.#gnulag           3533
2.   ircnet.#worldchat         3497
3.   freenode.#python          2441
4.   freenode.##linux          2362
5.   rizon.#chat               1959
6.   tilde_chat.#meta          1447
7.   freenode.#anime           1422
8.   2600net.#2600             1150
9.   freenode.##chat           1093
10.  gotham.#funchat           921
11.  quakenet.#anime           914
12.  rizon.#rice               866
13.  snoonet.#linuxmasterrace  826
14.  slashnet.#xkcd            746
15.  rizon.#8_a_               688
16.  freenode.#cat-v           643
17.  darkscience.#darkscience  613
18.  quakenet.#quarantine      572
19.  efnet.#computers          497
20.  gotham.#gotham            274
21.  freenode.#tmux            221
22.  freenode.#sway            219
23.  gotham.#twilightzone      201
24.  freenode.#minetest        158
25.  freenode.#lobsters        149
26.  freenode.##anime          140
27.  freenode.#fedora          135
28.  snoonet.#portland         128
29.  freenode.#reddit          118
30.  freenode.#firefox         78
31.  ircnet.#ircnet            77
32.  supernets.#superbowl      60
33.  rizon.#rizon              50