Saturday, August 11, 2007

A List of some of the most annoying IRC personalites

Anyone who IRCs regularly know of a few distinct personalities that irritate to the core. It's almost as if there is a nest somewhere making sure that the supply of lost AOLers, obnoxious 13 year olds and elitist know nothings don't run out. No matter how many you try to kick/ban off the planet.

This is by no means a complete list, but just a few that stuck out in my mind at the time of writing.

The Elitist Know Nothing: This guy talks about everything with complete authority and refuses to budge on any topic as if he were the one who invented it. In all actuality, The Elitist Know Nothing, picked up most everything he knows from biased trade journals written by other Elitist Know Nothings. He has never really ever applied any of his knowledge to see if it's actually true or not. He just assumes that it is, and makes sure that you know your 20 years of programming experience mean nothing in the face of his all knowing intellect.

The Lost AOLer: This guy somehow managed to find IRC. He doesn't know exactly where he is. He is constantly confused as to why the ##linux (must be some kind of kinky sex act) members don't want to cyber with him.

THE 10-15 YEAR OLD: THESE GUYS ARE A MIX BETWEEN THE LOST AOLER AND THE ELITIST KNOW NOTHING. THEY HAVE FIGURED OUT THAT THEIR COMPUTER IS PRETTY SPIFFY AND THAT QBASIC CAN MAKE IT DO SOME KEWL STUFF. THEY THINK CAPS LOOK KEWLER THAN LOWERCASE AND YOU CAN ONLY HOPE AND PRAY THAT SOMEONE DOESN'T TEACH THEM L337. THE BRIGHT SIDE IS THAT THE 10-15 YEAR OLD WILL MAGICALLY LOG ON ONE DAY A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON.

The Scary Asian/Arab: This kid barges in the channel and asks questions in mildly coherent English that most likely threaten every bit of security you have. For example: say you run a shell server, the Scary Asian will come asking for an account.. for stuff and ssh. When you ask what kind of stuff he will give some vague answer. You figure he's harmless because he kinda sounds like the 10-15 year old. Two weeks later all your bandwidth disappears and you find most of it going through a ssh tunnel he set up. The FBI knocks on your door to inquire about some files going through your server.

The I Can't Read The Topic Guy: This guy will wander into the channel and paste 30 lines of code right off. Of course the code is C and the channel is #perl, but that doesn't stop him. He then goes on to ask a question about the code while four other channel members try to explain various things to him such as "this is #perl" or "there's a pastebin for a reason." The I Can't read The Topic Guy will then make some sort of apology and go spam all 30 lines of code in #C.

The Enter Key Abuser:
This Guy
Does not understand
that
pressing enter after every
1-5 words
is irritating
and that people would listen
to him more
if he stopped that

Mr. Offtopic: This guy never talks about anything on topic. He'll tell you about the state of his room, the color of his socks, or about how awesome the hot pockets him mom brought him are. Never mind the fact that this is the #cryptography channel and you are trying to explain something to someone. Mr. Offtopic does not actually need any interaction from other users. He will continue rambling on regardless.

The Evil Wizard: This is the guy that's been programming for 30 years and has achieved wizardry. His sole purpose in life is to hang out in the help channels and inform anyone who asks a question how dumb they are. He refuses to part with any useful knowledge and instead tells people to google it or links to the most cryptic documentation he knows of. Delights in making newbies give up on whatever they were trying to do.

The 50/50 Guy: This guy actually knows his stuff.. Half of the time. The other half he cycles between all the annoying IRC personalties. He'll be talking coherently about a C program he wrote one minute and then suddenly go into a string of expletives and tell you about his toenails.

A part 2 coming some time in the future!
EDIT: Part 2 is up!

21 comments:

tonybears said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

The Observationalist

This guy thinks he is better than everybody on IRC because he is able to lump the vast majority of users into groups. He most likely posts his 'findings' on a popular blog website that has nothing to do with IRC. While he believes his research is good for a few laughs, the truth is he submits his blog to the Digg community, and hopes that a few of the users are at least aware of IRC so that he may derive a few chuckles.

DammitCoetzee said...

@scott
Actually I consider myself a 50/50. I wrote it because I felt like it and originally just wanted to show it to the guys on ##nonlogic on freenode.

They liked it so I decided to digg it.

And yes, I am a bit elitist, but I run linux so what do you expect? =P

Captain America said...

LOL, this is funny.. I have been hanging around IRC ever since my BBS disconnect and I have to say, I think you have hit it on the head.

Funny stuff

Paula said...

This was funny. I have no idea what IRC is and I'm not a programmer at all, but I know that all the chat communities have their annoying participants and the way you've written your post makes it easy to understand why all the different types of users are annoying.
I Dugg It...

LoneWolf367 said...

I live on IRC. I'm totally the Enter Key Abused-50/50 guy. I found it very entertaining.

I'm also slightly elitist. BSD > Linx, FTW! lol.

Grant said...

I'm the lost AOLer. How'd I get here?

Unknown said...

What's a "string of explicatives?" A string of "expletives" maybe?

OneYearGoal.com said...

Too true. That's hilarious.

One Man. One Year. $100,000 online. So I can hire an expert instead of putting myself at the mercy of IRC.
http://www.oneyeargoal.com

The Loudmouthman said...

Allow me to add the other three groups most commonly found;

There are usually one of three types of groups I see providing support and advice that deters rather than encourages conversation.

The Dont dig there, Dig it elsewhere group
This group wil usuall exist to answer your question with yet another question? Youve asked about a problem with Nero Burner and they they respond , “oh why dont you just use gnome-burner” . Its not a bad response but its not an answer to the problem. We need to learn to answer questions in such a way as to make the result feel like a learning and relevant experience.

The JFGI and come back when you have learnt group
I have mentioned this one before but the small group who seem to believe that we teach people to fish by giving them a book ( or sending them back to a search engine ) actually believe they are contributing to the support pool. Its frustrating as ever to be told to do something when you dont have the context to do it well in the first place. Again this goes back to the Digging a hole group who wont actually move a conversation forward but have done their best to stop it because “it annoys them !”

The Territorial marking society
I love (or loathe ) these people in particular, and they are the hardest to spot unless your sitting back with a sociologists hat . These are the ones who will make a comment or a response over the top of anyone elses contribution or suggestion. Usually this comment is to point out that they A) did it before and it didnt work out B) did it bigger and subsequently have the better tools and options C) have more of them and dont feel that its useful or D) dont think the suggestion has merit. These are potentially the most poisonous since their suggestions will actually undermine the interest and investment of taking part in the community.

ps . yep I actially blogged about this

http://www.loudmouthman.com/2007/08/06/as-an-old-saying-goes/

Neil.V said...

hahaha, dude you're fuckin funny, post more shit, and come to creepydudes.blogspot.com too. it may be your style.

lowki shomu said...

lol datz so mi .io :D sybdivaidid

Michael said...

Thank you for reminding me why I hate IRC so much

Unknown said...

Even though I'm 14, I am a 50/50. I usually stick on topic, and I am also an op on a channel on a not-so-well known IRC network.

So shut the hell up, because even though some of us are young, we know what we doing.

And with that, I'm off to IRC.

Jim said...

The Nickchanger

* TomZzZ is now know as TomShower
* TomShower is now known as TomBreakfast
* TomBreakfast is now know as TomWork
* TomWork is now know as TomBreak
* TomBreak is now know as TomWork
* TomWork is now know as TomAfk
* TomAfk is now known as TomChatting
* TomChatting is now known as TomZzZ

Karl L. Gechlik said...

LMFAO! Nice any0ne that has ever been on irc for more than a few minutes knows what the author is talking about. Its not the n00bs that bother us its the n00bs that want to pretend to be 1337...

AskTheAdmin.com

Send em on over to us... We will put them in their place :)

DammitCoetzee said...

@captain america
Thanks! =D That's what I was hoping I'd do

@jucydelish
Yea, some these personalities show up on more than just irc. Thanks for the digg.

@lonewolf
Haha yea, I tend to be, the enter key abuser, mr. offtopic and 50/50.
Linux FTW =D

@grant
AOL Keyword: awesome

@who
Thanks, I fixed it. I had no idea why spell check was flagging it as a mispell.

@oneyeargoal
I can't decide to erase your post or not... On one hand.. it looks like spam.. on the other you said my blog was funny... =P

@reducedhackers
nice :)

@neilv
Thanks! Nice blog btw.

@lolkamaf
what?

@Michael
You're welcome.

@dakota
I specified a range and stated that one day they all will log on a normal person. So by some logical thought anyone in the 10-15 range can be a normal person as well. You do sound in the 14-16 range though.

@jim
lol, yea that annoys me too.

@karl
Yea, it's suprising how common some of these personalities are.

Online Galleries said...

Speaking as an op in ##linux, I have to say this is all sounding very very familiar :)

I'd particularly like to agree with the previous comment which complains about the JFGI crowd. How about they Just F*cking Help People instead?!

DammitCoetzee said...

@denny
Yea, It sucks when people don't help. Especially when your problem requires a unique set of instructions and the problem solving abilities of someone far more qualified than yourself.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Izno said...

I think http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/ has quite the thorough covering of some of these... :)