selenium logs

Date-ordered chat logs for the Selenium project, as plain text, one file per day at <channel>/YYYY/MM/DD.txt.

Channel	Covered here
selenium/	2011-02-10 → 2026-08-08
selenium-tlc/	2018-07-01 → 2026-08-09

Months that hold both an IRC and a Slack record are suffixed — 2016/03-irc beside 2016/03-slack. Everything from mid-2013 onward uses one line format:

[YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS] nick: message

The earliest logs predate that convention and are carried over from SeleniumHQ/irc-logs as they were found: 2011/ is flat .log files stamped 2011-02-10T00:08:41, and 2012-05 through early 2013 uses session headers with time-only stamps. There are no logs at all between 2011-10-07 and 2012-05-01.

Where the logs come from

Project chat has moved between IRC and Slack, and for five years ran in both at once. Who was recording it, and where that recording ended up, changed several times:

Dates	Chat	Logged by	Archived at
2011 → 2015-09-30	#selenium on freenode	selbot2, written by Jari Bakken	SeleniumHQ/irc-logs (archived)
2015-03-01 → 2018-11-08	#selenium on freenode	botbot.me	service gone, Wayback Machine only
2018-11-02 → 2021-06-02	#selenium on freenode	logbot.info	service gone, Wayback Machine only
2015-09-08 → present	#selenium on Slack	Slack	Slack Export

The IRC and Slack overlap

The record is continuous, but not in one place. Slack #selenium opens on 2015-09-08, three weeks before selbot2's IRC logs stop on 2015-09-30. The conversation moved; the old repo was simply never extended.

Ever since, the two have been joined by a bridge — two of them, in succession:

Dates	Bridge	Ran over
2016-03-26 → 2021-08-26	slack-irc	freenode
2021-10-01 → 2025-11-12	Matrix	Libera.Chat

The first bridge went up on 2016-03-26, running ekmartin's slack-irc Node bot under the nick se-irc. Luke Tierney (lucast) forked it later that year and maintained it from then on. It ran for five years, carrying messages both ways:

• Someone on IRC appeared in Slack under their IRC nick.
• Someone in Slack appeared on IRC with -sl added to their name — ardesco in Slack posted as ardesco-sl on IRC.

So for that whole period, an IRC log and the Slack log of the same day are largely the same conversation recorded twice, once from each side.

Everyone moved from freenode to Libera.Chat in May 2021. That bridge was discontinued and the project switched to Matrix from 2021-10-01 — this is where Matrix first enters the picture, and it had nothing to do with the freenode years. Names from this era carry their full Matrix ID, like mechtilde (@mechtilde:libera.chat) or AutomatedTester (@automatedtester:matrix.org).

How much of Slack came from IRC

Nearly everything, at first. Counts combine #selenium and #selenium-tlc so the table reflects project chat volume, not just traffic in one channel — much of the conversation moved to #selenium-tlc once it opened. The IRC column is #selenium only, since the bridges never carried the other channel, and their share fell steadily as the community settled on Slack directly:

Year	Messages	From IRC	Share
2016	73,926	65,568	88.7%
2017	128,139	103,041	80.4%
2018	89,503	61,786	69.0%
2019	58,331	23,793	40.8%
2020	47,760	13,843	29.0%
2021	40,394	5,511	13.6%
2022	33,878	5,692	16.8%
2023	29,764	3,056	10.3%
2024	12,662	135	1.1%
2025	11,416	88	0.8%

Across 2016–2025, 54% of everything said in the two channels arrived through one bridge or the other. #selenium-tlc is effectively all Slack — the freenode bridge never touched it at all.

Public logging of the IRC side stops on 2021-06-02, so from that point on this repo is the only surviving record of the IRC conversation, arriving second-hand through the bridge.

Updating

New logs come from a fresh Slack export. The export itself is not committed — it is several hundred megabytes of JSON and is kept separately. Drop the two channel directories and users.json into source/ (see source/README.txt for the layout), then:

python3 scripts/build_slack.py

Or a single channel:

python3 scripts/build_slack.py selenium-tlc

users.json is the only metadata file needed; it resolves user IDs to display names. Everything else in a Slack export is unused.

Python 3.7 or newer, standard library only — no virtualenv, no dependencies. Day files are overwritten in place, so re-running over a newer export is safe, and months that carry both records (10-slack beside 10-irc) are written to their suffixed directory rather than a duplicate.

The IRC logs are not regenerated. They were recovered from the Wayback Machine's copies of botbot.me, which no longer exists, and are checked in as-is. Timestamps throughout are UTC.