TO DO LIST:
- people take this faq thing too fucking seriously
- we do WANT to know if someone is harassing via PM
- Remove this section and make comment-hiding work properly. :(
(If you're an op in #nanowrimo, or otherwise an editor for this, see the IRC Ops team on gitorious and the general FAQ's eventual home. Pester ianmcorvidae for access/permissions)
Proudly helping aspiring authors since October 2006! Last updated 22 November 2011.
IMPORTANT: If you are under 13, you can't be here. Seriously. It could get
GoodChatting (who graciously host our channel) and us into
quite a bit of trouble. If you're one of those kids who is responsible and capable of handling
themselves among adults—sorry. You still need to leave.
Unless we never find out. But remember, we will find out. We always find out.
English is the primary language of this channel. We will try to understand you if you
don't speak it perfectly, but please be aware that if we can't understand you, there's really no point in
chatting here. Chatspeak, leet, and the other things along those lines do not count as English.
If we need to provide examples of what not to do, we will.
First of all—welcome to NaNoWriMo, and to the channel. Although this channel was the original and once the official IRC channel for NaNo, it is currently unofficial. But it is still the best and is the home of some of the craziest Wrimos.
We hope that you have a great time not only writing your novel, but chatting with the rest of us as we work alongside you. Well, some of us. A few of us just don't really write. Given the topic of the channel, it is most active in November, but it is also active the rest of the year.
Now, a few things that one should know before chatting.
Here are a few tidbits and pointers that may help one to keep from looking like a newbie to chatting, even if you are!
As a nod to the origins of IRC, the words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this section of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 (and yes, the capitalization does matter).
/nick newnick
, where
newnick
is whatever one wants to change it to. However, IRC doesn't allow spaces
in nicks, so a nick like "The End" will simply show up as "The". If one wants two words in their nick, they
SHOULD use either CamelCase,
some_underscores, or maybe even
dashes. There's a bunch of other punctuation that is/isn't allowed in nicks, some for
legacy reasons. Legacy meaning "IRC was originally for Finnish people", in some cases. They used what we
(English speaking people) see as weird punctuation (namely {}|[]\ (all of which are allowed in nicknames)) to
represent characters of their language (Ää, Åå, Öö, Øø) in their character encodings before Unicode (or even
ISO-8859-1) was popular. (And encodings other than UTF-* mostly became popular because Microsoft didn't want
to rework FAT to properly support Unicode.) In short: fucking Microsoft fucking with their fucking
fuckery. A few things about nicks that MUST be taken into account:
/msg nickserv register password email
, replacing
password
(which is, by the way, case sensitive)
with one's chosen password, and email
with an email address. This prevents
anyone else from using the same nick. Then, when one logs in to the chat, one can log in with Nickserv by
typing /msg nickserv identify password
.a-z A-Z
), numbers (0-9
), and special characters:
backslashes (\
), backticks (`
), carets
(^
), curly braces ({}
), dashes
(-
), pipes (|
), underscores
(_
), and square brackets ([]
). Nicknames MUST start
with a letter. See RFC 1459 section: 2.3.1 Message format in 'pseudo' BNF; _ isn't
there but everything else is from that is. See the UnrealIRCd documentation for proof it's allowed on
GoodChatting. I suspect GoodChatting hasn't enabled any other character sets beyond the default allowed,
but I suppose it could be tested…although preferably not in #nanowrimo. :P/me actiontext
,
where actiontext
is whatever action they want to "do".
And if you start abusing actions, be prepared that you will be the butt of a lot of
jokes involving your dubious ability to actually communicate./msg person message
. If anyone needs
the person
and message
explained to them by now, too bad for them. They can deal.
However, one SHOULD ask permission before PMing someone. Some people do not like to receive private messages out
of the blue, and many people consider sudden or unwanted private messages an invasion of their personal space
and/or their privacy.
nanowrimo@goodchatting.com
./join channel
, where channel
is the name of the
channel one wants to join. Then there's always all the other IRC networks and all the
multitude of channels not on the same network/server. But that's an entirely different question to begin
with.These are a few things specific to our channel that will help to keep you out of trouble.
nanowrimo@goodchatting.com
so that we can review it
further.
Be obscure clearly.~E.B. White
/join #elsewhere
.rel="nofollow"
doesn't exist in IRC, but /kick sure does!We all suffer greatly in the name of poor art.~AdamNegral
Now, to the more pleasant stuff:
!startwar pause length
, where pause
is the length
of time until the Word War starts (maximum 15 minutes) and length
is the length
of the war. If you have a BattleJesus problem, talk to Jude.