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Away messages suck. Please turn them off.
You see, nobody on IRC gives a rat's ass where you are at any given point in
the day. If they do, they can contact you via more appropriate, private
means.
In the meantime, there are forty other people on the channel you're spamming
with your play-by-plays who are all on ten or twenty other channels
themselves. Your stupid
* randomgit is back: I'm done pissing now!
messages are forcing them to at least
look at a window and read something they don't care about, potentially
they even have to wiggle their mice around and click on things in order
to find out you've run out of pork rinds and are going down to the
Minute Mart for more.
Were you even talking to anyone before you announced that? Do any of your
actual *friends* need to know? No! That's the beauty of IRC: it's
asynchronous. If you're leaving your client connected anyway, the messages will still be there
when you get back! It isn't like talking to your grandma on the
phone. You can scroll right up there and read the things you missed.
Seriously, if you're that worried about people wanting to talk to you while
you're away and finding you unresponsive, it's a simple matter to set yourself
away without public notifications and automatically inform people
who /msg you that you're out. You can log anything sent to you privately,
or even public messages that contain your nick! I mean, we're talking about
15 lines of trivial ircii script here, counting comments. And you don't
annoy a single person!
Changing your nick is not ok, either.
The same thing goes for being a rabid nick-swapper:
*** randomgit is now known as git_lunch
*** git_lunch is now known as pssng_git
*** pssng_git is now known as githairct
*** githairct is now known as randomgit
We just don't care. No one on IRC has any misunderstandings about
the nature of the medium. It's all about idle chatter. People do not
assume that you're hovering there over your keyboard drooling over the
next message to come down the pipe, or that you've got an 802.11 connection
jacked straight into your skull just so you can instantly respond to their
off-topic Enlightenment configuration questions at any time of the day.
Leave your nick the way it was. It's not cute, it's not helpful, and it's
just confusing to people who come in looking for you later.
That said, changing your nick is a lesser sin than public /away messages,
because it's easy to filter out.
Auto-away messages are the spawn of Satan.
* randomgit is away: (Auto-Away after 10 mins) [BX-MsgLog On]
DO NOT MAKE ME KILL YOU!!!
Someone needs to beat panasync six miles deep into hard granite for even
thinking about making that a BitchX default. I mean, what was he
thinking?! That is the single-most annoying misfeature I can think of
in recent software history excepting Microsoft Chat in comics mode. How's
that for company? Mirc, in all its pristine glory (praise khaled!), is far
less annoying than that.
Here's a tip: if you don't want your IRC experience cut tragically short,
do this:
$ echo set auto_away off >> ~/.bitchxrc
The world will be forever indebted to you for it. Or else it will ban
you from all its channels.
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