[IAEP] chatzilla IRC

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 27.11.2008, at 11:41, Bill Kerr wrote:
> issues for newbies like me (things which joel / shenki explained to  
> me separately):
>
> * it appears that 60 people are in the room but many are not there

That's mostly an issue of time zone, and secondly of getting attention.

The trick with time zones is matching a world clock against the sleep  
schedule of certain professions ;)

The trick with getting attention is to direct messages at specific  
persons, like "bertf: etoys saving works again, yay!". This is a  
regular message, everyone can see it, but most IRC clients beep and  
highlight such a line if the user's nick name is mentioned literally.

There is a third part of course, matching nick names to real persons.  
It's one of my pet peeves that people need to role-play in otherwise  
serious conversations, but it apparently is one of those odd habits  
that's not going to fade.

One trick with that is "/whois nick" which might actually report the  
real name. More reliably, some users list their IRC nick at

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:IRC_users

HTH,

- Bert -