[colug-432] IRC for beginners

[R P Herrold]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2015, Jacob Ulrich wrote:

> Hello COLUG. Would anybody have a good, intuitive IRC guide for 
> beginners?

This question came up at the CO-PY lunch Wednesday as well

_most_ treat IRC as a essentially synchronous, low overhead 
communication; Compare similarly, AOL Instant Messenger, text 
messages, heavily abbreviated.  Low formality

but there is another way: async as to questions posed, and 
answers received.  Still able to be focused and tactically 
fast when needed, but also a place to 'hang out' in all day, 
if not longer.  With less emphasis on 'now' it is possible to 
narrow the focus of a channel to let 'regulars', often domain 
matter experts, give 'better' answers, and even better still, 
to 'do instruction'  I had that vision, and gathered a few 
lieutenants, for the former #centos channel on freenode, and 
ran it to that vision for several years, I think with great 
results
	https://wiki.centos.org/irc
	https://wiki.centos.org/SpoonFeed

The latter describes the motivation for NOT being 'short 
form'; bacuase the #centos channel got questions from whoever 
happened to find it, and because there was a discipline of NOT 
spoonfeeding, but rather, instructing, the takeaway was that 
if one wanted a quick assessment of where '[holes' in ones' 
skillset might be, seeing what well-formed and on topic 
questions one could NOT give a good answer to, was a quick way 
to inventory what to go study

Private communication IRC channels can also be set up, where 
long running conversations by a trusted group of 'regulars' 
can talk, asynchronously, but knowing that their peers in the 
channel have taken steps so that the 'back-scroll' might be 
reviewed and responded to (the IRC client: irssi, and running 
on a rare to reboot server, under 'screen' permit this)

Setting u an IRC server is doable, but rarely worth it, as one 
can use the public IRC servers without charge in most cases.  
For a local 'inside the firewall' 'corporate' IRC server, 
the protocol (along with 'Jabber') each have FOSS 
implementations.  Documentation at the Freenode site is pretty 
good as to usage 

-- Russ herrold