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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.

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You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting?

I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.

My irssi remains open all the time I'm in front of the computer - Shadowcat's primary internal co-ordination means is IRC, plus I'm on a dozen or so irc.perl.org channels, plus a handful on freenode.

It does not, however, alert me in any way as to whether somebody's tried to contact me or not - so it only gets my attention when I want it to, usually because I'm thinking about something and can type responses on autopilot while I do.

Where I work we use IRC as the main way to communicate (we all telecommute) and I have a window open all day long. The secret? Tell your IRC client to make a noise whenever someone mentions your IRC nick and then ignore the IRC window until it makes the noise. Works like a charm and allows me to focus on the task at hand.

I use an IRC bouncer to stay logged in to the IRC servers. I connect to the bouncer, which replays anything I missed on the IRC server while I'm not logged in to the bouncer.

If you have a shell account or a vps you could just keep running irssi or weechat inside screen or tmux.

I do this. But I have a really hard time segmenting conversations. So I end up with large logs and no way to read them.

I wish there was a way to say, "show me everything from the current conversation alone". Maybe by tracking @replies or something.

Can you share the name of the bouncer? Sounds like nice functionality...

I use znc running on a slice. (http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC)

I've also heard of Bip (http://bip.t1r.net/), but I've never used it.

Thanks I started using ZNC since yesterday. Finding it awesome!

What exactly is "running on a slice"?

Slice = virtual server at http://www.slicehost.com/

exactly what wrs said.

I run znc on a small VPS instance that is always running, always up, so I don't have to worry about keeping my connection to an IRC server open. ZNC (the bouncer) keeps me logged in to the IRC server, and I connect to ZNC when I need to be in contact with others.

I use irssi-proxy, so I can both log in from SSH and write as well as connect via a local IRC client to it.

I personally use ZNC and I love it.

I'm using bip IRC proxy and I have no complaints. (couldn't get secure connection working with freenode the last time I tried it).

It's only distracting if you allow it to distract you.

I keep it running in a seperate screen session that I open occasionally throughout the day.

Just have the irc window on a separate virtual desktop.

I run ERC in Emacs - background buffers - all day long.

I wanted to second this. I do the same thing. We use IRC at my company and we all work remotely. Having IRC in my editor makes things much simpler since I can easily copy/paste code, visit links and generally stay in one environment all day.

I keep the client running in the background (not even minimized). I have it set to save a log of all chats. I occasionally glance through those logs 2-3 times during the day. That's also the same frequency with which I check my mail.

You apparently have ADD. You should seek help. There is a difference in preventing distraction and people "intruding" your thought process. I shut a lot of things off (preventing distraction) as well during the day (including Mail at times), however, IRC doesn't "intrude" in my daily work, it just sits there, open, and I check it when I can, participate in a conversation, and move on.

Minimize it to the tray.

I much prefer this to posting a question on a forum/stackoverflow etc type site. Probably my own impatience, but I want an answer now.

IRC is actually growing a load. It's pretty widely used. The fun thing is, I don't think anyone really realizes it, and it's still considered 'old stuff' by many.

If you look at the numbers, twitter usage is about the same as one of the tiny IRC networks in terms of volume of messages. Of course it's apples vs frogs comparison, but still... More communication is done on IRC than twitter and all the other "hot" new things.

#startups is good on freenode (If you can stand freenode and their 'ways')

#linode on oftc is great

#googleajaxapis is cool on geekshed

#mibbit is great on irc.mibbit.net :)

I think you may be to blame for some of this growth ;) Not that I mind...I've used IRC for ages and I'm glad to see that people are gaining interest in it again.

I started using irc in january of 2008, about the time I started using linux.

I'm on foonetic and subluminal (a new network, about 6 or 7 months old). foonetic is host to the various #xkcd-<whatever> channels, as well as the main #xkcd channel. subluminal is just something some friends of mine put together. the average user count is in the twenties.

Absolutely this. Freenode is a tremendous resource. I adore the fact that for just about any project I can tab over to IRC, /join #projectname, and have a channel full of people who can answer the big blocking question that I can't find an answer for on Google.

If you can't lurk and review in realtime, setup logging on your irc client and review later. I do automatically no matter what, happy that if a great conversation occurs, it's automatically captured. Screen, tmux, or similar may be helpfull in this case; setup your client in tmux on appropriate computer, detach, and review later.

Apart for those who are special and need their own network. Like Gnome or Mozilla.

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