This set of guidelines for newbies is intended to make life easier for yourself and others. They're specifically designed for #keble, and may or may not be appropriate for other channels on OxIRC or private msg conversations. Blatantly ignoring them is probably not the best way to make yourself friends (though feel free to prove me wrong...)
If you're coming to #keble from other IRC channels out there on the big bad Internet, you may find these conventions rather surprising or out-dated. You should still respect them, however; if you don't want to there are many other places that will be less fussy :-)
Please send comments, questions, suggestions, etc etc to me.
#keble is mostly a community of friends based around Oxford University who know each other in person. People from the university are encouraged to get involved; if you're not from the university you should probably think carefully about why you're there. That said, there are many people on there who are not from the university and who are very close parts of the community.
#keble is not a help-desk. #keble is not a help-desk. #keble is not a help-desk. Regulars who are a part of the #keble community sometimes ask each other for help; this is a very different thing from coming on only to ask for help and not making any effort to get to know the people concerned. #linux and #work may be appropriate forums <pedant>^Wfora</pedant> for such requests, but don't expect many people to be there.
Lurking without making any contribution to the conversation is frowned upon. Of course newbies will be reluctant to say too much to begin with for fear of not fitting in; but if you try to be yourself and keep this page in mind, you'll probably find that you fit in just fine.
Mentioning a web page on channel, particularly one that you've written, *especially* a commercial one, is an open invitation for several people on channel to rip it apart from many possible angles. Do not take offence!
Configure your client so it doesn't annoy other people. In particular, changing your nick or automatically sending a message to channel to indicate that you're away is not acceptable; neither are clients that automatically set you away and send a message to the channel when you're idle for too long. Colour codes and beeps are frowned upon. Don't spam or flood the channel by using cut and paste or by abusing the bots (many of the standard bot commands such as !explain can be done by /msg; #test is good for trying things out).
DON'T SHOUT or uZE L337 5p33|< (or indeed TXT SPK). Note that "i c" and "4 u" and the like fall under the latter category. Capitalise the letter 'I' correctly, and (try to) use apostrophes appropriately.
Existing regulars won't necessarily follow these guidelines. Don't jump on them unless you really know what you're doing. Occasional irony is permitted.
Ganesh uses Pine, not mutt. Don't ask. Really.
Web page(s) maintained by
Ganesh Sittampalam
Last updated 4/5/03