there are a number of people with Ubuntu IRC cloaks who have expired from the ubuntumembers group

I did several rounds of cloak cleanup while on the council. As a reference, I'll explain how I went about dealing with it.

First, you will want to convert the list of Launchpad account names to IRC account names. Relatively recently, we started verifying that users have their IRC name specified on their Launchpad profile before granting them a cloak. However, for some older accounts, there won't be an IRC name specified. You can usually find it by trying different nicknames the person uses for Launchpad, email, etc.

Once you have a list of names, you will want to confirm that they actually still have an ubuntu/member cloak. You will find that some people no longer have the cloak for various reasons. If they don't have a cloak, you can simply remove them from the cloaked users group on Launchpad.

While checking if they have an ubuntu/member cloak, you should also pay attention to whether they are currently online or have been online recently. For these users, I would try and send them a PM on IRC asking if they meant to let their Ubuntu Membership lapse. If they say no, I point them to the board/council that originally granted them membership (they can simply re-add them). If they say yes, I make sure that they understand that by not being a member, they lose out on all of the benefits listed on the /Membership wiki page (including IRC cloaks).

Eventually, you will be left with a list of IRC names for people who no longer wish to be IRC members or who have gone missing and are no longer around. At this point, you will want to come up with a short message to send to these users. I typically went with something like, "Your ubuntu/member cloak has been replaced with an unaffiliated cloak due to you no longer being an Ubuntu Member. Questions? Ask in #ubuntu-irc. To have the unaffiliated cloak removed, ask staff in #freenode." Remember, it is being sent on IRC, so it needs to be fairly short and concise. As the message states, we typically fall back to unaffiliated cloaks for the users so that they are not unexpectedly uncloaked. Different things are sometimes done for users with dual project cloaks.

Now, simply contact a freenode staffer to have them help you with the cloaks. I did cloak cleanup when the list was quite long. As a result, I had the staffer send the message to the users at the same time they removed the cloak (to speed things up). If there are only a couple, you can send the message yourself. MemoServ will allow them to receive the message the next time they are online (and sometimes, they will also receive an email notification). You will also receive a notification when they read the message.

Once the staffer notifies you that the cloaks have been removed, don't forget to update the cloaked users Launchpad group.

Afterwards, you will probably end up with 1 or 2 people joining #ubuntu-irc to ask about their cloak. Once they get re-added to ~ubuntumembers, you can follow the normal procedures for cloaking a user.

I hope this helps, and I would be more than glad to help you deal with these users (with either my Ubuntu hat or my freenode staff hat).

the backlog has been cleared out and we are basically on top of this now. We will run the script every month at meeting times to see if new actions need to be taken.