Survival Guide:IRC
mahdiyusuf.com
mahdiyusuf.com
1. Find a large number of technical IRC channels. 2. Idle in all of them.
E.g. Want to know what Netiquette is? Read this RFC. Curious about HTTP? Here's the RFC and some other good materials.
I think there are many "perma threads" that all beginners eventually end up asking, it would cool if they were all easily accessible from one place.
So many bot wars.. could have been avoided.
It's nice to see it though in IRC terms, though. The point about being able to post, and then wait for an answer is important. Sometimes we want a quick answer and can't get it on IRC. Each channel has it's own activity level and culture and it's important to know how different channels work.
This is admittedly anecdotal, but I often see people refer questioners to SO entries as the answer to something and I've had more success getting answers to things by posting a SO question and then throwing the URL for that into an IRC channel than trying to establish everything in the channel itself.
Maybe SO is just acting like a pastie.org that you can also get answers to.
Deleted comment
Your post came in as I deleted. Thanks for response, I'll pick it up.
> what OS are you running and what don't you like
> about irssi?
Things I'm not thrilled about - the way it's set up, by default it loads new chat windows over the top of my hilight buffer. I couldn't find a way to isolate that window, and have it create down the bottom.
> when I'm AFK and someone privatemessages
Also, I fiddled quite a bit trying to get autologin to freenode and channel join to work without luck.
Irssi is the best I've found, and I try to stick to console apps so that's a plus and it mostly works for me. But I thought my needs were quite simple and hence thought it wouldn't be too much to think that there'd be something that worked my way out of the box.
I've actually written a module for ZNC [1] that will send push notifications to your computer or mobile phone, using a variety of services, whenever you get mentioned or private messaged. The conditions for sending a push notification can be customized to your heart's content, and you don't have to worry about missing replies to your questions.
If you want more details about the setup, I wrote an article [2] describing my entire IRC stack; you can get as simple or as complicated as you want.
That's what irssi's awaylog is for. Learn it, use it, love it.
> Also, I fiddled quite a bit trying to get autologin to freenode and channel join to work without luck.
...every day, quite a few people coming with this problem to freenode's #irssi manage to do that, after some pointers from the channel's regulars. It's quite easy, really. http://irssi.org/documentation/startup#c3 might help you.
Also for developers, tendency is to leave IRC. See the new chat system of metastack.
As for the video of numb3rs. Who haven't seen that also...