Ubuntu IRC is a real turn-off

I hope I am posting this in the right section, but I find that time and time again, Ubuntu IRC is actively hostile to helping out Ubuntu users.

If I'm not posting this in the right section, I apologize, I thought this one seemed most appropriate.

First off, I'd say on a scale of 1-10, my linux and technical knowledge is maybe a 6. I've been using Linux for several years, and usually can fix my own problems without much issue.

The problems I experience on the Ubuntu IRC are generally problems with moderation above all else. Here's some typical scenarios on Ubuntu IRC.

-A user logs in, says "Hey, I'm having issues with my monitor!"
-Someone will say !ubottu | X
-Ubottu will spit out some blurb that has nothing to do with users issue.
-The user clarifies their issue
-Other users tell that user to follow Ubottu's advice

Ubottu makes users with real issues feel like nobody cares, and let's be honest, the people who use ubottu to answer questions generally DON'T care about the issue. People don't go into the IRC chat the first time they have an issue, they google the problem first. Chances are, whatever Ubottu is telling them, they've already looked into.

Here's another common scenario:

-User comes in asking about a common issue, but happens to be using something that isn't Ubuntu, but is Ubuntu-based (ie, Linux Mint)
-People tell user they don't support X distribution, even though the problem is probably something that is the same in both distributions
-User is told to go to his distributions channel

Often times the user will get around this issue by lying. Many IRC channels for smaller distributions have X-Chat set up to go to #ubuntu upon signing into Freenode. They do this because they have much smaller communities and are probably almost identical to Ubuntu in the first place, the only differences being in the amount of packages included in the base distribution. Ubuntu is built off of the work of the entire Open Source community, and it isn't appropriate, in my opinion, to tell someone to bugger off because they're using a tweaked version of the same OS. It's not like Ubuntu is the sole creative output of a single entity, it's a collaboration, and help should be given to all who use open source software.

Here's the situation that prompted me to make this thread:

-I join #ubuntu, ask if someone can help me set up Broadcom-STA for a non-official kernel... mind you, I'm running Ubuntu, I'm just running a different kernel because of issues I had with the main release
-Another user offers to help
-Moderators get angry and kick me from the channel because I'm getting support about a non-official kernel.

Obviously this is absurd. I got the kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa...3.4.4-quantal/ . It's not like it's a BSD kernel, it's a Linux kernel that was vetted and released by Linus, then packaged into a .deb by some nice fellow so Ubuntu users can use it.

Here's the main problem: The face that the Ubuntu IRC is presenting to the world is the same face they see when they call their cell-phones technical support line. No answers, no assistance, if you void the warranty, you're gone. "You should have read the contract more clearly", "We're not going to support you", "Contact your computer manufacturer". It's all pretty similar. Instead of them seeing the wonderfully collaborative side of Open Source Software, where people spend their free time helping each other out and making programs out of their need for the programs to exist, then sharing their programs with the world, they see a bureaucratic mess of "We won't help you".

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution available, and when Ubuntu has a community made out of lawyers and politicians, it makes the entire community look bad.

I'm of the opinion that the Ubuntu IRC should be moderated a bit nicer, and be a little less hostile to people with problems. Feel free to tell me how wrong I am, but this is my two cents.

I'd argue with you, but in my experience you're not wrong; that's the general populace of IRC. It obviously hasn't changed in the last 18 years.

OP, when I have a question about a custom kernel/compiling a kernel, I ask the guys in Gentoo. Generally they are willing to help me with that on Ubuntu, though I do admit that I have spent a bit of time there in the past and have run a few Gentoo installs. Might want to get familiar with Gentoo (VirtualBox?) and see if they can help your Ubuntu kernel problems.

Cipherboy

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Originally Posted by cipherboy_loc

OP, when I have a question about a custom kernel/compiling a kernel, I ask the guys in Gentoo. Generally they are willing to help me with that on Ubuntu, though I do admit that I have spent a bit of time there in the past and have run a few Gentoo installs. Might want to get familiar with Gentoo (VirtualBox?) and see if they can help your Ubuntu kernel problems.

Cipherboy

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That's pretty good advice, I hear the Gentoo community doesn't mind getting nice and technical. I've used Slackware on my other computers and that's all find/dandy, but right now I'm in a foreign country and I don't want to be playing with my setup more than I need to, if you know what I mean.

I will only say that your rhetoric is based on your personal assumptions and opinions of what others think, this makes it null and void in my opinion. You're basically projecting your opinions and experience on other users.

I have spent 1000's of hours there helping people and lurking to learn.

It's one IRC channel I don't frequent, that and there is way to much traffic in there.

Thread moved to The Community Cafe.

Unfortunately not much the forum can do about the conduct of others on IRC. There is an IRC Council and also an appeal process etc.


404

The last time I went to #ubuntu on IRC was to ask about a potential bug with the halt command on 12.04 and I was basically told: "You are doing it wrong. Use poweroff, not halt."

Needless to say, I got no help with figuring out if it was a bug or "working as intended"

Perhaps try #ubuntu-beginners next time?

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Originally Posted by not found

Unfortunately not much the forum can do about the conduct of others on IRC. There is an IRC Council and also an appeal process etc.

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Huge +1 to that. If an OP is abusing their powers, submit a complaint.

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Originally Posted by wilee-nilee

I will only say that your rhetoric is based on your personal assumptions and opinions of what others think, this makes it null and void in my opinion. You're basically projecting your opinions and experience on other users.

I have spent 1000's of hours there helping people and lurking to learn.

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I hope I didn't come off as sounding like most people in the Ubuntu IRC are an issue, I am mostly criticizing the moderation style and some common habits of people in the channel. If you help people out then I'm sure they appreciate you. Also, I think I should note that I consider myself a "user", therefore I'm hardly casting my personal assumptions on what other people think, but I doubt I'm the only person in the world who thinks the contrast between help in #ubuntu is not to par with the help offered in other open-source project channels.

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Originally Posted by Nillerz

I hope I didn't come off as sounding like most people in the Ubuntu IRC are an issue, I am mostly criticizing the moderation style and some common habits of people in the channel. If you help people out then I'm sure they appreciate you. Also, I think I should note that I consider myself a "user", therefore I'm hardly casting my personal assumptions on what other people think, but I doubt I'm the only person in the world who thinks the contrast between help in #ubuntu is not to par with the help offered in other open-source project channels.

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I will only add that it is not for everyone it has its positive and negative attributes and many between.

Basically I consider al the possibilities for a user you have mentioned as tools some work better then other in a contextual analysis.

Sorry to see though that you have not found the channel to be helpful. ;)

The BS comes at you faster on irc, so does the help, so do the hack attempts due to the fact that most users do not know how to set up a vhost. I think irc is a terrible place to send noobs.. esp. freenode which will gladly show your ip address to everyone. Just my 2 centavos.

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Originally Posted by |{urse

The BS comes at you faster on irc, so does the help, so do the hack attempts due to the fact that most users do not know how to set up a vhost. I think irc is a terrible place to send noobs.. esp. freenode which will gladly show your ip address to everyone. Just my 2 centavos.

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Fair arguments I think at times, but it is well moderated, and you can call the mods.

Never once been hacked, but I joined and have a cloak on my IP as well.

There is a windows channel #windows I have never seen anybody there have a problem with hack from freenode, does not mean it does not happen though.

You would just basically use the same user protection you would on the web there.

Large percentage of the users though that come for help might fit the newer user catagory.

You might find this (and the subsequent comments) interesting :

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/201...ays-wrong.html

A while back, Jeff Hoogland, maker of Bodhi Linux and Pinguy OS (I think) went off on the #fedora IRC channel for much the same reasons. I think what you're experiencing is what happens to human beings on the great world wide web. We get ugly (and stupid).

Jeff summed up his article this way:

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"I would just like to take a moment to say to all the self proclaimed Linux help nazis out there:

You are not God's gift to your Linux help channel.

When a person asks a question, if you are not going to help - then don't. When someone seems to be asking an odd question - odds are you don't know everything about their story. If their question is truly odd, perhaps just throw a mention of warning after helping them accomplish their task.
Needless to say I left #fedora after a few mind numbing moments and simply installed pcmanfm (which launched as super user just fine).

Whew. I apologize if you are a decent person who really tries to help (instead of criticize) in #fedora on freenode. It just seems more often than not in the four years I've been using Linux as my primary operating system I have always met with resistance in that channel."

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Oh I only know it happens because I've done it so many times. In fact if we liked a target on another irc network (typically quake rizon or dalnet) then it was a huge help if we could get that user to join freenode for some made-up reason or another just so we could get their ip easily.

Just want to also add that was 6 or 7 years ago and I have since moved on to more profitable and legal ventures.

Hope I don't get infracted for saying that, but people need to know.

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Originally Posted by VTPoet

You might find this (and the subsequent comments) interesting :

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/201...ays-wrong.html

A while back, Jeff Hoogland, maker of Bodhi Linux and Pinguy OS (I think) went off on the #fedora IRC channel for much the same reasons. I think what you're experiencing is what happens to human beings on the great world wide web. We get ugly (and stupid).

Jeff summed up his article this way:

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Well, it's good to know I'm in good company. I stopped using Fedora when I did an update and it uninstalled Emerald, then installed GTK Theme Manager or something. This was made all the worse because Emerald wasn't available in the repositories anymore.

Who the heck makes that sort of decision?!

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Originally Posted by Nillerz

Well, it's good to know I'm in good company. I stopped using Fedora when I did an update and it uninstalled Emerald, then installed GTK Theme Manager or something. This was made all the worse because Emerald wasn't available in the repositories anymore.

Who the heck makes that sort of decision?!

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Last I checked compiz got removed from Fedora so that's normal behavior for the package manager.

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Originally Posted by C!oud

Last I checked compiz got removed from Fedora so that's normal behavior for the package manager.

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Nobody expects that drastic of a change from a routine update.

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Originally Posted by Grenage

I'd argue with you, but in my experience you're not wrong; that's the general populace of IRC. It obviously hasn't changed in the last 18 years.

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I will argue with you though. That is not normal *or* an IRC thing. There's a ton of channels on freenode where you actually feel like you're part of a community, that's just not #ubuntu's case. What the OP experienced is what keeps me away from #ubuntu for some time now, even though I'm an active freenode user. I had similar problems there, with stuck-up users (not even moderators, mind you) that think they own the land. That place is worse than #gentoo and #openbsd nowadays. And it's not like I asked how do you install X package or how do I change the desktop wallpaper. I consider myself to be quite an experienced Linux user, just not that good with Ubuntu since I'm new-ish to it.

In #ubuntu there's a 80-90% chance of getting laughed at if you're new, no matter how serious your problem is. I've tried fixing stuff atleast 10 times with their help, and only once I received actual answers (didn't help, but atleast they tried).

Signal-to-noise ratio is really bad on IRC. If you've got a specific problem the best place to get a solution is here or askubuntu.com (the latter being better for the really techy stuff).

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Originally Posted by Paqman

Signal-to-noise ratio is really bad on IRC. If you've got a specific problem the best place to get a solution is here or askubuntu.com (the latter being better for the really techy stuff).

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I agree. I've never used IRC and the behavior from the OP seems to mirror pretty much any higher volume IRC channel. I wouldn't let that be a turn-off to Ubuntu because I've heard the same complaints from the #debian channel. Stick with the forums, especially since forums are easily indexed by search engines.

Hi

Just to say that the #ubuntu channel is different than the #ubuntuforums channel.

In the #ubuntuforums channel you can meet some of the moderators and admin staff. It's a chat channel and not a support channel so don't ask support questions but come in and say hello.

I would like to think we are friendly and approachable but you can be the judge of that when you come into the channel.

See my signature for webchat.

Kind regards

#ubuntu is a mixed bag

1. First and foremost, please keep in mind, traditionally the forums has been somewhat isolated from the ubuntu community and we are trying to integrate.

2. This is not the place for feedback to the IRC group, you should direct this feedback to the Irc Council

3. As with the forums, #ubuntu is a large channel with all the advantages and disadvantages that go with it.

4. IRC sort of has different standards of behavior.

5. "Bot abuse" happens , no doubt, but what do you expect ?

"How do I set up Apache?" is not a great question either. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP is not a bad answer to this question.

If the question is repeated, "How do I set up Apache?", without any indication the questioner has read the link, or has a more specific question, what do you expect on IRC ? again " https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP " .

You can not honestly expect people to type out that link.

Is it bot abuse ? or lack or reading / poor questions ?

6. #ubuntu is a large community. 1630 users in the channel right now. Some of them will act badly. When you see bad behavior:

a. Bring it to the attention of the IRC Council.
b. Act as a catalyst.

http://freenode.net/channel_guidelines.shtml
http://freenode.net/catalysts.shtml

c. Do not generalize. One bad person != the entire irc community is bad.

7. Other channels mentioned in this thread:

#ubuntuforums - This is a channel to discuss Forums Policies / Procedures with staff between FC meetings. If forums policy is not under active discussion , it is then a social channel to meet with the staff and other community members.

#ubuntu-beginners - This is a channel run by the Beginner Team as an alternate, less crowded support channel. You are welcome to provide IRC support there as well as send users new to IRC to this channel for support.

To me #ubuntu feels like a call center, too many people seems like they follow a script and don't really know anything. People in a call center will ask you to reboot, people in ubuntu will ask you to pastebin a log or something, even if it's clearly irrelevant to the problem at hand. My advice about #ubuntu: just don't go there. The fact that IRC is definitely not suitable for tech support with so much people talking at the same time doesn't help: in the forums everyone has their own thread and it's a lot less messy.