Thanks, Kate! This will definitely come in handy for new peeps. :) Erin

On Mar 20, 2019, at 1:43 PM, Kate Krauss <ailanthus@riseup.net> wrote:

Hi all,

I recently decided to rejoin IRC, and it was complicated and glitchy. It took weeks of troubleshooting and a manual re-set from pastly, who was working with someone at OFTC. Many thanks to phoul and pastly for their kindness and help. I know that it takes one minute or less for a very experienced person to start and troubleshoot a new account on IRC, and I am not that person.

I have written a short guide for people who have never used--and maybe never heard of--IRC before. You can forward this email (or whatever final version is developed) to friends who want to volunteer for Tor but are daunted by IRC. The persona I'm focusing on:

**A person who has not used IRC before and may or may not be technical.** (I’m starting with English, but other languages are needed as well.)

The goal is to get new people up and running, talking on IRC to Tor people, in real time, with as little frustration as possible. There are also cultural aspects to IRC that require explanation to prevent frustration, so below I have linked to a couple websites that can help. Moving people from webchat to a special client is a project for another time.

Please send your input, focused on this hapless individual who has never used IRC before but wants to help Tor. I wonder if there are better docs on IRC culture? Apologies in advance for anything that is annoyingly inaccurate. Can fix!

Cheers,

Katie

——————————

IRC FOR COMPLETE BEGINNERS

Tor staff and community members communicate using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to do their daily work. IRC is a group chat platform a bit like Slack, but it is open source and non-commercial. Here is the simplest possible guide for getting onto IRC and starting to chat with Tor people in real time.

1. Click this link: https://webchat.oftc.net/

2. Fill in the blanks:

NICKNAME: Anything you want, but choose the same nickname every time you use IRC to talk to people on Tor. If your nickname is already being used, you will get a message from the system and you should choose another one.

CHANNEL: #tor

3. Click Enter, and you will enter the biggest Tor channel, #tor, which is essentially a chatroom. The #tor channel is like a big train station. It usually includes Tor developers, founders, and other community members. There are some random people in #tor as well. Feel free to ignore.

You can ask questions here, and people may be able to answer right away, or there may be a bit of a delay. If you want to talk to someone specific, start your comment with their nickname (if you know it) and they will typically get a notification that someone is trying to contact them.

Sample questions: “This is my first time ever on IRC. Who can I talk to about doing translations for Tor?”

or:

“ailanthus: Who can I talk to at Tor about volunteering for UX?”

Tor also uses another channel, #tor-project, for discussions and to coordinate work. Your nick (nickname) must be registered to join this channel. You can follow instructions for registering your nick using the IRC cheat sheet linked below. If you get stuck, you can ask for help in the #tor channel.

To switch channels, type: /join #nameofchatroom then hit Enter

IRC has been around for decades, and has its own culture. Here are some tips for navigating IRC:

An IRC cheatsheet https://gist.github.com/xero/2d6e4b061b4ecbeb9f99 (includes instructions for registering your nickname)

More on IRC: https://www.drupal.org/irc/usage

Good luck! My nickname is ailanthus and I’m often on IRC. Come say hi!

*Tor also maintains an email list for its Community Team, which includes volunteers. To join this email list, start here: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-community-team

--ailanthus ——————————-

Kate Krauss Twitter: @aidspol _______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project

On 2019-03-20 6:48 pm, waywardwyrd@riseup.net wrote:

Thank you so much for putting this together, Kate! This will be super useful.

Glad to hear it :) - Kate

On 2019-03-20 7:24 pm, Antoine Beaupré wrote:

On 2019-03-20 13:43:22, Kate Krauss wrote: [...]

Hi!

That's a great introduction! I feel it would be a great document to refer to in the future, do you mind adding it to the Trac Wiki somewhere? Maybe somewhere under this page which I just found out about (!):

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/onboarding

It even has a dead link to a possible IRC page here:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/onboarding/IRC

Let me know if you need help with the wiki as well.

A.

Dear anarcat, Good idea! Let's see if people have any other input, and then I will attempt to do this. I think I can do this if I can still log on to trac (not sure; haven't tried in a while). Folks, if you have a non-technical family member at home who doesn't use IRC, ask them to try it, without helping them. Find out what went wrong or right. Then we will learn. -Katie ps: nice Cocteau quote :)

I think that, once this doc has been somewhat cristalized, we could add it to the community portal somewhere, and point to it from https://lektor-staging.torproject.org/tpo/staging/es/contact/

But the wiki page is a nice place to start it, for sure!

Thanks, emmapeel! -K

...

This is a nice introduction.

In our online (IRC) based summer training, we are using the following guide for introduction to IRC.

https://summertraining.readthedocs.io/en/latest/irc.html

Kushal

Thanks, Kushal. IRC is 31 years old! Where were the balloons last year? -Katie