Talking Tech on IRC

This post is part of a series for Drexel’s INFO 324 class, Team Process and Product

Internet Relay Chat or IRC is a great tool for communicating with a diverse community of internet users. IRC allows you to connect to a network of chat rooms or” channels” and talk to other users in real-time. The great thing about IRC is that it is full of other geeks and technical professionals and there are tons of active channels where you can get help with problems are just talk about new developments, such as #ubuntu, ##windows, #android, #debian, #python, and ##linux. And those are just a few of the channels on the freenode.net network.

For my INFO 324 assignment, I was asked to “Blog about what you read, and your thoughts pro and/or con about IRC as a communication tool for computing professionals.”

In my time spent on the Freenode server, I lurked in the ##windows channel. While I was there, I saw the 45oish people or so in the channel  just hang out and ask the occasional tech question. For instance, a user asked anyone if they knew how to troubleshoot installing Type 1 fonts and their registry. Later, people were helping a user troubleshoot using a USB Wi-Fu card and getting it to connect to secure networks.

It’s great that you can get live support on almost anything via the internet, and get an instantaneous response. Next time I am stumped on a tech issue, I think I will try my hand at asking the members of an appropriate IRC channel.

The one downside of using a large IRC channel is that it’s hard to follow the conversation. Everyone is pretty much shouting over each other, and there is no indication when someone is typing. While you can have private conversations via IRC, it’s considered rude to start one with a user without asking permission first, and then you lose out on the benefit of having the “hive mind” of the room.