Irking Out The Perks Of IRC
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is at the center of many Open Source communities and is often hailed as a natural support medium for the community. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore whether the now aging IRC medium is still relevant, how useful it is to end users and how it can be used to spread knowledge inside communities.
52 Comments to “Irking Out The Perks Of IRC”
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I think that IRC is great. One app that comes to mind when talking about integration is eMule. For many years, eMule has had IRC built into it for online, live support and that has helped to make the MindForge network what it is today. I used to be one of the people giving support on that network and after leaving, I tried to find other apps that do this and I had no luck whatsoever. So I think that IRC as it is is great for communication, getting to know others in the community, information transfer (even file transfer with DCC), and education. But I would definitely love to see more apps that include IRC built into them for support and education. Lernid is an awesome idea and I wish it much success.
-Yos
I find IRC great if you need something on a ‘now for now’ basis, a technical questioned that can be answered with a command line instruction is ideal. You have a problem that you need solving, and there’s the answer.
If in the future you want to look at doing it another way then there are other mediums such as support forums where people have the ability to post screen-shots, and other aids. A great learning tool, but can be quite long-winded.
IRC has been around for a long time, and a lot longer than the vast majority of forums. I think it still has a place, but users have a lot more choice of mediums to get there answers and information.
Hmm.. little bit of a fail that the shotofjaq IRC channel only got mentioned in passing.
I’ve always found IRC as the best way to get really technical support. Had a problem with my N810 a few times, and IRC was the place to go to get it resolved quickly. A bit later, the hardware failed in a massive way, and even IRC couldn’t help with that.
Also IRC is great for bugging developers. But other than that, I try avoid it cause it is noisy as hell.
Getting answers is a good use of IRC but as I’ve been working with the Ubuntu Studio developers it has been most useful to me for coordinating efforts. IRC provides real-time interaction for communication that email might take hours or days to accomplish the same.
Additionally, the monthly Ubuntu Studio developer meeting is held on IRC. I can’t think of another reasonable vector to hold such a meeting with people literally around the world.
IRC certainly is a perfectly functional way to get and provide support to your community. Especially if the community at large is tech savvy. It wouldn’t still be around today if it didn’t get results.
That said, I think forums or customized solutions like Get Satisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/) provide better results. By threading discussions around issues, the troubleshooting steps and ultimate solutions become easily documented and retained. From there, it’s very easy to build a knowledge base around reoccurring issues or questions.
What is interesting is that Ubuntu has a dedicated help/support system called Answers, but, despite the fact that it often attracts the users who need the most help, it seems to be “off the radar” when people discuss getting help for Ubuntu.
To me IRC isn’t “perfectly functional” unless there is a link or button that somebody can press that will put them into an IRC room where they can get help without first figuring out how to connect to an IRC server.
Ubuntu Software Center works well for the complete newb. After you use Ubuntu for more than 10 minutes, you find lots of stuff online where you use apt-get or synaptic. It is NOT WRONG to use apt-get. It’s PART OF learning how to use Linux. The command line is a essential part of Ubuntu and it’s one of MANY ways to install apps. The PROBLEM with IRC is not IRC itself but the people in the channel. You find lots of people in the channel that are super smart and automatically assume everyone knows how to DO those basic things. The thing is we should NEVER assume. We shouldn’t treat people like babies either. However there are many times I’ve asked a question in IRC and it doesn’t get answered or worse I get told to RTFM when there is no Fine Manual. So hear is what we should do:
I disagree about software center entirely. I’ve been using Debian-based distros for twelve years, before apt had become the norm, and management was done via dselect and dpkg.
apt is absolutely amazing, but for my wife (who is an Ubuntu user), Software Center makes a lot more sense when she’s looking for things, because it’s more discoverable than apt, aptitude or synaptic. Hell, I even use software center when I’m just browsing what’s available out there, because it makes browsing a lot more pleasant than any other mechanism, even though it has some more work that it needs.
The fact is, that most users don’t really want to have to pull up a command line to do a bunch of stuff, and there is no reason we should just expect a user to use sudo apt-get anything.
I think that this shot is complimentary to the shot about technical support. I don’t go to the IRC for indepth descriptions. I use IRC when I need the geel answer and move on. Although I am biased, IRC for me will always be the identica, twitter or facebook of choice.
Not sure about automatically opening web pages in Lernid. Which browser engine does it embed? What happens if a hole is found in that engine? I could join a channel with lots of Lernid users, post a link to an attack site and root you all…
Lernid’s use case is for Ubuntu Developer Week and similar events, where there are two channels run side-by-side to operate a “lecture”: #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat. #ubuntu-classroom is moderated; only the speaker is able to speak in there, while #ubuntu-classroom-chat is unmoderated and used for discussion and asking of questions. Lernid only automatically shows links mentioned by the speaker in #ubuntu-classroom; there is still, obviously, a risk that a speaker could exploit a bug in the web rendering engine, but it’s mitigated by speakers being somewhat trusted anyway (they’ve been invited to speak).
For a while I was giving lots of help and advice on answers.launchpad.net for various projects. For me the advantage of giving terminal commands even over the mailing-list interface of Answers is precisely speed. The users being helped often need step-by-step directions. It is much faster to give complete step-by-step direction using terminal commands.
What I’ve read here shows me that most of the people who listen to ShotofJack have a strong tecnical background. And that is the problem with the IRC as it is now, is is TOO TECNICAL.
A newbie goes to #whatever and asks for help, what does he get?…most of the time he gets a “google it and get lost”
IRC is not for a newbie or for someone who isn’t waiting for a RTFM answer.
“A newbie goes to #whatever and asks for help, what does he get?…most of the time he gets a “google it and get lost””
I’m not sure I agree with this as I’ve had some really good experiences with #ubuntu-motu when I started building packages.
The response a peson gets once they find their way into an IRC channel has everything to do with the culture of the community and nothing to do with the technology itself.
Agreed!
In terms of getting technical support on Linux I find the IRC channels to be useless. I consider it a result to even get a reply to my question, and 9 times out of 10 your questions go unanswered and soon get pushed up the list.
Forums are much better I have found as you can post a problem and then check back later and see a reply, with IRC unless the person who is willing to help sees you post then and there you just don’t get a reply. I seem to have no better luck in busy channels or in quiet ones. It is useless either way.
I guess this depends on the busy-ness of the channel. If it’s crowded then you get what you’ve seen – nobody answers the question because it’s gone too quickly.
I’ve never used IRC (but maybe I’ll try) and would always search forums and use forums or mailing lists for getting help because the information is persistent. Are IRC conversations persistent? How would you sort the wheat from the chaff to decide what to keep?
Mind you, I’ve posted about 7 problems to the ubuntuforums over the years and got one (helpful) reply, so it doesn’t always work.
I like b1ackcr0w’s idea of using GoogleWave because it’s persistent, replayable, multi-modal (text, pictures, video), has conversation threads. It’s perfect for it, AFAICT. Pity it’s so slow atm. (I know my 2004 Dell lappy isn’t a beast these days but I get one keystroke per 10 seconds on GoogleWave. Lucky me.)
Is user support a possible use case for Google Wave?
I agree wholeheartedly (I mention this above).
Text, video, pictures, conversation threads, persistence and replayability.
Sounds good to me.
Spot for a plug: At work we use an opensource IM tool called Sticker (www.tickertape.org/projects/sticker) which captures conversation threads and makes it a lot easier to see what’s being said in response to what (especially when you come into a conversation late).
It uses a tickertape display by default and can get pretty noisy, but you can have multiple tapes and redirect messages to different tapes based on their content. You can also get newsfeeds and stuff too – it’s kinda nice getting slashdot article headlines popping up when they’re available.
I agree that IRC needs to have additional features built on top of it. For one thing, there’s an optimum number of users that a channel can support. If you have too few users, then there’s nobody to talk to. If there are too many, then your questions just get lost in the noise. What would the #ubuntu channel be like if you had 20 times as many users on there at one time?
Some sort of bot to answer the routine questions might be a good idea. It could try to recognise the most common questions and point the user to a series of slides that would show them what to click on. I imagine that a lot of relatively simple questions get asked over and over again. Questions that don’t get handled by the bot could then be passed up to a level where the actual people are.
I think that’s a lousy solution – first, you can’t crowd source the bot’s content, not easily anyway – IRC is very poor tool for crowd sourcing knowledge. Second, it will simply serve to increase noise on busy channels.
For interactive support we have IRC, mailing-lists, forum posts. Am I missing any?
All the solutions we have for support right now are fairly cheap and are in text. The text communication certainly makes itself conducive to terminal commands. Other wise you feel like you are wasting your time and their time. Trying to explain GUI actions in a clearway is not concise.
I think the solutions thus far has been driven by resources, bandwidth has been expensive, still is in many countries, but couldn’t we start offering people in higher bandwidth areas some more natural mediums.
What about an audible chat. like mumble. or google voice. The support would have to be localized for languages and latency but it could be an additional support channel. Would be cool if some LUGs started experimenting maby.
Iv never played with google wave so I don’t know its advantages/ disadvantages or its capabilities. Iv seen the demo and it might be useful.
I think IRC has been useful and will continue to be, but its time to spread the wings a bit.
I agree. IRC is lightweight and quick because all it’s doing is transferring text.
The lack of audio means you don’t have trouble with accents or language to the greater degree, but I can understand it would have big advantages.
I had an experience with Linksys, I think, where I had a one-on-one chat session with one of their techs which was really valuable and they sent me a transcript of the conversation afterwards. With IRC your transcript, although valuable and searchable, would be littered with unrelated comments, so I guess it’s the one-on-one thing that’s really valuable.
Spreading wings sounds good though.
I know the answer use one big gobby doc……no wait….We could use jabber but its not as scalable as irc. We could use our personal gmail accounts but that would be a little weird I think because you have to add people before you can use it. irc is the best suited protocol for what we need it for but maybe we need to do some updating maybe extend the protocol but that would take some time and effort.
Yeah, I agree that using gmail accounts would be awkward. Perhaps some of the additional layering on top of IRC could be invites to an additional medium or at least move outside of the IRC noise to a different channel.
One thing that Aq said made me leap from my chair and cry “Oh dear god, no!”. Well, figuratively speaking, anyway.
I can think of nothing more annoying than every bit of software installed showing a video of how to start it after installation. I don’t think I only think this because I’m a technical user, either. Think of the general public’s reaction to Clippy, and the glee at his death.
He made the analogy to video games in the show, and I think the analogy is a good one. Contrast Half Life with Half Life 2 (Yes, these are more or less the only games I’ve played in the last half decade. Shush.) Half Life has a very explicit training level, couched in terms of a training course for users of the hazardous environment suit. Half Life 2 has no explicit training, but trains you through various gentle tasks while filling you in on the story, so it doesn’t feel like training at all.
The newer approach is much better, and I think we can all learn a thing or two from the game industry in this regard. When you’ve done the user interface right, the user trains themselves and you don’t need any explicit instructions. Of course, not all the games industry understands this… I’m thinking of the horrifying minutes long, unskipable training video in Wii Sports… It makes me want to punch the woman who did the voice over just thinking about it.
Ahem. I said “the first time you ever install a piece of software”, meaning “the first time you ever install software” rather than “every time you ever install any piece of software”. It’s not going to show you a video every time. Also, I bet as a technical user you’re using apt rather than Software Centre anyway
I’m not completely sold on the idea of “integrated training” a la HL2. It’s a good idea for a game because it has a completely linear flow and you never go back to the beginning. Inkscape isn’t like that; every time I start it I go back to the beginning and start from scratch, because I’m doing a brand new drawing.
Heh, actually since I left university, I’ve spent most of my waking life in Windows due to work, and it being far too much hassle to reboot for play. Sadly, I still think of myself as a Linux person though I use it less and less on the desktop. I realised the other day that I’m like one of those dads who still thinks they’re down with the kids. It’s horrifying. I end up using the Linux partition with the Windows ext2 drivers for storing stuff. sigh Fortunately, my work is very slowly moving to a position where I can actually do it all on Linux real soon now, so maybe one day I’ll be blissfully Windows free again.
Maintain the rage! ;o)
I prefer getting support from forums for one simple reason, longevity. I’ve never had a problem where I was the ONLY one to ever have that problem. Rather than flooding the IRC’s with the same question every few days, or hours why not get it answered in a forum where it’s much easier to search for?
I realise ideally once I fix the problem I should write a how-to but time constraints don’t always make that practical, at least if it was answered in a forum people can see the troubleshooting as it happened….
Excellent point, CyberCowboy. Every now and then someone makes a really nice complete forum post too, which can be a reference to others (I’m thinking of a tv tuner howto I used recently), although it’d be valuable to make that available on a wiki too. Ubuntu does a good job of this.
Hey Aq, canwe have an ‘agree’ button, please?
I agree – can we have an agree button please?
Have you looked at Linux Mint’s first run-menu which features tutorial links? That would be a good way of tying into the features and functions you mentioned.
BTW, what are the default gui and commandline IRC clients in Ubuntu? I must have uninstalled them somewhere along the line? Ta.
I use xchat-gnome. NFI about the command line
commandline must be irssi
Jono,
Could XMPP possibly be a better/more flexible protocol to extend with the features you’ve mentioned, rather than IRC?
Ilan
I totally agree with the remark of XMPP. A good example of a multi-user chat is http://www.speeqe.com/ where you can create a room to be used by registered jabber account (google talk, jabber.org, etc) and even guest accounts.
The problem of people explaining solutions to newbie problems using console commands is completely unrelated to IRC – I see this a lot in forum posts as well, knowledge base articles and even blogs that aim to “help newbies with Linux”. I obviously think its completely wrong (I believe so does Jono).
I think the problem is mostly what Jono describes – people who tend to answer these technical questions (A) do not think about solving the problem for the newbie – they think about how they would go about solving that problem, and (B) they do not think about how to help newbies learn to solve problems but just how to solve that particular problem. It may also be that they think that spewing obscure incantations makes them cool, but I’m normally loath to use ego arguments to explain bad behavior.
Regardless of anything, I think IRC is completely outdated as a tech support method. For one it is annoyingly temporal – writing stuff on IRC is like writing on ice, once your words of wisdom scroll out of the screen they are completely gone and anyone who missed that cannot learn it anymore. IRC was useful for a time that the community was small enough and homogeneous enough that they could all hang out together at about the same times and on the other hand there were no good web publishing tools available, so you’re only other option was mailing lists (and not even with web archives – these came in much later). IRC is still a good medium for meetings that you can schedule up in advance, but for technical support you can’t beat the web where everything you type in is archived and made searchable. Some of the immediacy is lost, but it is more then made up for by the other benefits, and even the immediacy problem can be solved when people will stop using the horrible phpBB as a forum system.
Also, I hate IRC because if you don’t need help on a very very very popular subject (and an easy one at that), you can never find anyone in the channel – as Aq mentioned.
I really like the direction of drawing stuff into the IRC stream.
I think that’s what Ted Nelson, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson, meant by pushing for “transclusion”, as apposed to hyperlinking. The effect of hyperlinkage is to constantly take you away from your context, transclusion brings the info to your context.
May be related to the next SOJ about distraction.
Thanks, Kent
I don’t know about using IRC in particular, but I love the idea of including other content in a conversation (transclusion, indeed). I’ve been looking for a twitter client that did this: I’m sure there’s something around. Bits of text, images, YouTube videos, audio clips. All good.
Something that actively pushes a link or image or whatever to you once it’s posted? Oh goodness, I can imagine the tons of tubgirl/goatse/insert-shock-meme-here masked under a URL shortening service. Great way to compromise a user’s session too, IMO. Personally, I’ll take a link that I HAVE to click on any day, that way I have the choice.
See response to gerv above: http://shotofjaq.org/2009/12/irking-out-the-perks-of-irc/comment-page-1/#comment-898
A bit late to the discussion, but I just heard the shot now… the one point I’d like to make is that it’s a distinction between nouns and verbs… IRC, using the shell, programming, all use verbs. you tell the computer to do something. You ask a question. You use all parts of language, not just nouns.
Having to hunt through a bunch of menus to find the object (window) with the setting you’re looking for, well, it’s just painful when you know the language. When you go somewhere you don’t speak the language, you resort to pointing at objects-you can get simple points across. But you’re going to have severe limits to the discussion.
So I think IRC is a great place for people who want to learn at a depth beyond what the casual user/tourist will ever learn. But for the tourist who has no interest in becoming fluent, it’s probably not the best place to seek help.
I’m missing something here. You appear to be making a case that written language can’t ever solve someone’s problem, or speak to anyone who isn’t invested in the subject already, which I’m sure would come as a surprise to all the book publishers in the world
Why is written language OK for Dan Brown and not OK for #ubuntu? How could IRC change to make it as readable as, say, Harry Potter books?
It might be interesting for lernid/IRC to have the ability to create a ssh-tunneled VNC connection to actually enable someone to show how to do the gui stuff.
Obviously there are some serious security issues to consider to ensure that you’re not providing the GUI equivillent of copy and pasting “rm -rf /”
However, it might aid responses being more than command-line solutions..
Creating SSH tunnelled VNC sessions would pose a major security and probably more importantly a privacy risk, the person on the other end of the connection could look at absolutely anything on the tunnelled to computer. It would also pose problems technical problems as ports would lickly need opening on any NAT routers, unless NAT traversal was used.
The triggered, pre made
slide show' orscreencast’ idea presented in the podcast is a much better solution.The main reason why terminal commands are often given is because the people who populate distro IRC channels, mailing lists and forums are generally technically minded and have reached the point of realising that the command line with features like tab completion and shell scripting is simply the fastest way to get things done. The GUI and WYSIWYG models provide no simple way of defining a batch of operations to preform.
Sure on distros like Ubuntu most things can be done using a GUI, but it is almost always substantially slower than the CLI way.
Isn’t IRC a bit like the “clueful ISP” covered a few shots back? Since it seems only those in the know really use IRC then it is no wonder people will answer with apt etc, rather than Software Center.
The idea of creating things to make IRC a richer experience I think is a great idea and would help new people using it.
However if not done correctly this could backfire horrible.
Anyone remember MS Comic Chat ? It would prefix loads of random characters before what you said. This almost never went down well in chatrooms and people would often get flamed or even kicked/banned.