SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
mattie_p
on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:00AM
from the idk-about-you-but-irc-irks-me dept.
from the idk-about-you-but-irc-irks-me dept.
Landon writes:
"The (evil?) IRC overlord and crew are wondering what you think about our new IRC network. What can we do better? What do you want to see happen with our new network? Heck, should we even have a new network?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
How Would the Community Like Their Soylent IRC?
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 41 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stderr on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:29PM
Too be honest, I don't really see the point...
One thing I find really annoying about the whole switch to the other IRC "network" is that it seems like you just decided to switch without asking the community first. I thought the overall plan with SoylentNews was to ask and listen to the community before making any big decisions.
Has that plan been dropped already? Remember that a lot of us just participated in slashcott, a week-long boycott of a site some of us had been using for years. We haven't even used SoylentNews for a week yet and may not be as loyal as you might think. If we decide to boycott you, based on a Dice'y move like that, we might never come back.
First of all, stop forwarding between the old and the new channels. It really disrupt the flow when "everything" looks like it's written by the same "user". It breaks tab-completion on nicks (since people ain't really on the same channel as you) and you can't send them a private message either (cause they're not even on the same IRC network as you).
Because of those two points, you kind of have to join both networks and channels anyway to get tab-completion and private messages working, but if you're in both the old and the new channels, you'll see everything twice. Especially annoying when your IRC client is set to highlight channels where your nick has been mentioned. You hurry over to another channel, just to see that it was the exact same thing, you just read in the channel you came from.
Furthermore, do we really need two bots telling us all the headlines? One should be enough.
It might be an idea to make a main channel for general chatting and a channel for each "section" of SoylentNews, e.g. #SoylentNews-software and #SoylentNews-hardware. Then move the headline-bot out of the chat channel and into the "section"-channels. Articles in the "software"-section should then only be announced in the "software"-channel where only the users interested in "software"-articles will be present. Think of it as an IRC-based RSS-feed. If the various section-channels are only used by the headline-bot (moderated channels (+m) with only the bot having voice (+v)) you could even have it write a bit more than just the headlines, maybe even the whole summary.
If you want to do something like that on your own IRC "network", it might be better to have one bot per section and ask your users to "subscribe" to the bots they're interested in. Headlines (and summaries?) could then be delivered by private messages.
While it might be a fun hack to use the existing user database for the users on IRC, I'm not sure that's enough reason for having your own IRC "network". You need a lot more than idlerpg, idlenerds and whatever trivia you got going on.
Having channels for the various groups in SoylentNews, could have been done on FreeNode too, e.g. #SoylentNews-dev, so that's not a good reason for switching either.
I fear that having to take care of an IRC "network" too, might take too much time for too little benefit. Time that could have been used much more efficient on the web server and the code for the site.
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" #
(Score: 3, Informative) by Landon on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:15PM
One thing I find really annoying about the whole switch to the other IRC "network" [...]
We got a little excited about this admittedly, I honestly did not expect any resistance to the change. The motivation for this post was you bringing up this topic in IRC however, so we are improving!
First of all, stop forwarding between the old and the new channels. [...]
I know this sucks and it's annoying, but it would fragment the community. Ideally, the Freenode channel empties out and we can find anyone who stumbles in there by mistake and quickly redirect them with use of the relay. I had the same problem of being in both networks and both channels for a while, excitedly hopping back and forth between these false hilights, but the solution is to really just be on one network or the other.
Furthermore, do we really need two bots telling us all the headlines? One should be enough.
Heh, I suppose not! I enjoy seeing BotBot race Bender to the headlines, but it would be easy enough to standardize on one bot.
It might be an idea to make a main channel for general chatting and a channel for each "section" of SoylentNews [...]
I'd like to see this done, right now we only have access to the main RSS feed and it'd require a plugin rewrite for Bender Maybe BotBot is better set up for that. As it is now, if we had separate RSS feeds for each topic, I could flip the switch so users can subscribe to arbitrary RSS feeds Bender is subscribed to.
[...] Having channels for the various groups in SoylentNews, could have been done on FreeNode too, e.g. #SoylentNews-dev, so that's not a good reason for switching either. [...]
In my opinion, adding 12 characters to every channel we want is worse than having our own network (even if it was down to one character, that's needless repetition).
I fear that having to take care of an IRC "network" too, might take too much time for too little benefit. Time that could have been used much more efficient on the web server and the code for the site.
At least for me, this is what I can contribute to the project with my time (xlefay may be a little more ambitious). I promise you, I wouldn't have had a snappy rewrite of /. in the works yet if I wasn't working on IRC :)