"Brian J. Beesley" wrote:
> The problem here is that using IRC you only get immediate response
> from those who happen to be online at the time.
That's not a problem, it's the purpose of IRC... ;) Regardless, I've
(intermittently) keeping up the channel #Mersenne on DALnet IRC network at
irc.dal.net (You need to grab a client from http://www.mirc.com if you use
Windows or http://www.irchelp.org otherwise to connect) and people are welcome
there, but we need some people or it'll be rather boring. I intended to
use/mean this channel in the same way www.mersenne.org as a sort of "All
distributed projects" channel.
> (1) IRC (like voice telephone) is on-line and you therefore tend to
> mouth off before thinking out a logical, coherent reply;
s/on-line/real-time. Actually, the same holds true for instant messengers and
the way most people use e-mail. It's also very much like the evil "Real World"
you hear legends being told about ;) In other words, it isn't just a
disadvantage, there are some advantages to that too.
As for myself, the main problem is that 99% of the time nothing is happening, I
pay per minute online, not to mention keeping me from doing something useful,
and when something interesting happens I'm never there anyway because of
timezones. On the positive side, you can have automated interactice services
(bots) that for example announce changes in web-sites etc. as things happen,
and presence on one of the IRC networks will always attract curious people who
may decide to join the effort.
> (2) Previous experience with joining an IRC group, leaving soon
> afterwards but taking ages to lose the vast pile of commercial spam
> which seems to be attracted to anyone who uses IRC at all.
They're called channels, and mostly that depends specifically on the channel
you join. If you get a message from a stranger to go to some channel for
example, don't join, because those kinds of channels have usually been set up
by somebody for the bizarre reason of getting high usercount alone and have
nothing happening but other such people advertising their channels! Also,
setting yourself "Invisible" from the mIRC login settings will remove you from
the public user listings so people can't message you with advertisements out of
the blue. However these days most IRC networks do pretty good work weeding out
those ads.
-Donwulff
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