Someone please, for the love of everything that is good and holy, explain the following to me. I am looking for rational, deductional logic, not opinions.
Why, when on IRC, I can use /me and /action, and no one could care less.
22:38:27 atoponce dances 22:38:31 atoponce is bored 22:41:05 atoponce gets a drink
No one could care less. Everyone in the channel goes about their business, and life continues as normal. But, as soon as the word “away” is in the /me or /action, the whole IRC network is up in arms!
12:13:45 atoponce is away: screen detached 12:13:51 < somedude> atoponce: don't do that. away scripts are annoying. thx. 12:13:59 < anotherdude> atoponce: away scripts suck 12:14:01 < wannabedude> atoponce: public away messages are lame, and you're lame for using one. turn it off.
Uh, why? Again, I’m not interested in opinions. I want a hard core philisophical reason why away scripts suck. And if they suck so bad, what is so blasted difficult about /ignore away? Just curious. If anyone can shed light on this subject, I would be delighted.
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There is no rational, or even irrational, explanation as to why people dislike them. It’s just one of those things that a community–for whatever reason–decides it doesn’t like something.
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Isn’t a philisophical reason an opinion?
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IRC doesn’t tell us when you’re dancing, bored, or getting a drink. If you want us to know that, you have to tell us.
OTOH, 90% of people are away 80% of the time, so if everyone said they were away all the time it would be a lot of noise. Plus, if we really want to know who’s away or not, our clients can tell us either explicitly or by greying out names, or we can ask the good old-fashioned way with /whois.
In short, you’re being redundant. We don’t want redundancy en masse, so we let people know we don’t appreciate their redundancy, before it gets out of hand.
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I dunno, it seems pretty simple to me — one is you doing something, another is an automechanism declaring your status that if we wanted to know, we could find out by ourselves.
Think about it this way — it would be equally annoying if everytime you entered a channel, you actioned that you were present.
Nobody cares about anyone’s status until they are actively looking for them.
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I actually thought your script was cool & tells me when you’re actually available (something that I often wonder when looking for your infinite wisdom).
Doesn’t make a lot of sense I guess.. just one of those unexplainable things. Like, why people use Gentoo
(yes, that was a digg at Steve commenting just above)
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So what happens when I change my nick?
~ atoponce is now atoponce|away
Is that just annoying? Because I get absolutely no flack for it at all, but using an away script, I do. Maybe I’ll use the away script to just change my nick. Then I won’t get any problems at all.
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Because irc is a public forum with an unwritten code of etiquette part of which says that automated responses are not good. The reason for this is because the depth of communication is greatly limited to only plain text in a real-time serial fashion any unnecessary interjection detracts from the already drastically constricted conversation space. This is probably why autonomous bots are so disliked. Yes, onjoin, offpart(?), and nick change messages are annoying, but how would you eliminate them in a plain text client while still knowing who’s around and what they are called? Multiple panes seems like it might be the answer with one pane showing who is online.
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