getting help from irc / forums

I ran across something, I think actually it was on the bluewhite64 page (I’m sorry if this upsets any viewers (lol), as there seems to be some controversy between bw64 and slamd64… ok not interested, I uninstalled them both) about wanting to answer questions on the forum because it STAYS there and is accessible for people in the future.

This contrasts help from IRC (which, of course, is much more of an immediate kind of help) in that if you want it archived you need to log the whole channel.

SOLUTIONS:

1. direct IRC users to the forums (this is against the grain, in a lot of cases)
2. develop better logging techniques; either bots pick up on keywords (the hard way, to figure out at least), or mods/q&a people direct bots to appropriate lines in order for them to be tagged.

I think that #2 (obviously, according to wording) is better. And specifically I think the second case is the better of the two. Users could be slowly indoctrinated to this as part of (slowly becoming yesteryear’s) “netiquette.” Like a msg from the bot, “was your question answered? c&p it here” where it’ll find the appropriate line #s and publish them…

or perhaps much better: a mod/op whatever they’re called or OMG there is no authority — someone will go through each day and highlight questions and their potential answers. duplicates will be dropped. you could just idle all day while at work, then coming home scroll back, see the good questions which got good answers, highlight, paste to bot (then is checked by bot for duplication, deciding title) who posts to website. website could be checked periodically (this would be a second and final layer, plenty for a q&a style forum/irc/whatever it is.)

tl;dr Too much is being lost from IRC. This is a good solution.

~ by dodecalogue on July 17, 2008.