#fedora and freenode registration

Mel Chua mel at redhat.com
Thu Feb 11 23:16:07 UTC 2010


On 02/11/2010 06:07 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 04:52:23PM -0500, Justin O'Brien wrote:
>> I think that this puts a barrier between users that need help and those
>> who can help.  I think we should just have a couple of trigger happy ops
>> and take no BS.
>>
>> Fedora as is all about the community and i dont think that we should
>> build a barrier between us and potential contributors.
>
> "Trigger happy" doesn't sound like a measured approach, although I
> definitely sympathize with your feelings toward people messing up our
> help channels. :-)  We bear at least some responsibility for making
> sure people in the help channel aren't tricked or victimized by
> attackers.  Since we can't guarantee 24-hour coverage by ops, it's a
> good idea to try and make people there a little safer as a default.
>
> Someone already suggested one way to mitigate the problem, which is to
> spit out a more useful message when the user is shunted suddently to
> the unregistered channel.  A URL pointing to a wiki page with simple
> instructions for getting registered should be included.  The
> admonition "register your nick" is not helpful or adequate.

Yeah... my younger cousin hit this yesterday when trying to figure out 
how to fix a botched F10 --> F12 upgrade. IRC familiarity, usually good 
about following instructions... I got called from dinner to explain what 
was going on, and ended up having to blink and squint and click around 
for a few minutes before figuring out what to type.

This had me a little worried about what happens to even less experienced 
people who don't have a Fedora cousin eating dinner downstairs.

I'll try to get her to write a draft of what would be a more useful 
message... where would we send that patch?

--Mel


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