[6bone] Re: pTLA request NDSOFTWARE - review closes 23 October 2002

[Arnout Engelen]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 11:08:34AM -0400, John Fraizer wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Abdul Basit wrote:
> >  As a matter of fact, being on irc is fun, you meet nice persons
> > and get help, it always the case with me.
> 
> OK.  If you say so.  Where did that come from?  I though we were talking
> about a pTLA application, not IRC.
> 
> Top 10 list of things I've found on IRC:
> 
> (1) 'leet d00dz plotting their next dDoS.
> (2) Pr0n.
> (3) People looking for pr0n.
> (4) pedofiles looking for their next victim.
> (5) potential victims (be it of a dDoS, a pedofile, or both.)
> (6) warez
> (7) people looking for warez.
> (8) Thousands on thousands of bots guarding the electronic "turf" of their
> prepubescent "owners."
> (9) Thousands on thousands of OTHER bots trying to steal that turf on
> behalf of their prepubescent "owners."
> (10) prepubescent bot owners bitching about having their "channel" taken
> over by some other prepubescent bot owner. 

Hm, I must say I indeed don't really understand what that statement had 
to do with the rest of Abdul's case, but I must say my own experience is 
quite different from Johns.

I'm on a few small channels (around 10-25 users usually, including 
idlers), and actually my experience is quite positive.

#wxwindows on opn, for example, is the channel of a neat cross-platfrom
gui toolkit (www.wxwindows.org, a tad like QT). Newbies who pop by are
helped getting started, finding out where the good docs are, etcetera,
all in a quite friendly way. More experienced users help the newbies and
discuss the more advanced issues at times.

I have consulted #ipv6 on that same server a couple of times, and got
pretty useful responses - I've even helped some people there doing
basic ipv6 dns and such. 

Every now and then I pop around on #debian, which is quite crowded but
mostly very helpful, too.

I've had some less friendly experiences of course, for example someone
on the aformentioned #ipv6 who suddenly refused to help me since I was
obviously incompetent and shouldn't be playing with grown-ups toys like
ipv6, but that is not very common. (I solved my problem on my own, I had
specified my default ipv6 route as '::' instead of as '2000::/3').


I guess it's mostly dependent on what server you're on, on opn there are
pretty good services (which prevent channel takeovers), no porn or warez
to be found (as far as I can tell) and a generally frienly crowd.

A typical example of 'ymmv', I guess.

-- 
Arnout Engelen <arnouten@bzzt.net>

  "If it sounds good, it /is/ good."
          -- Duke Ellington