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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

If you're using a bouncer, it's trivial to set it up to change your nickname when you're not there. That clearly communicates that you're not present, but that you will respond in time.

All the other points are kind of silly. You can say the exact same thing about email, or Slack/Hipchat, or SMS.

> There are many reasons why one might consider this unfortunate—no opportunity to be truly away, frequent interruptions, an inflated sense of urgency, and a powerful sense of "oh noes, I'm missing what's happening on IRC!!!!"

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>If you're using a bouncer, it's trivial to set it up to change your nickname when you're not there.

This is a terrible way to communicate your absence. It's spammy, potentially confusing and, worst of all, imitates a built in functionality of IRC. The _only_ correct way to set an away status is IRCs builtin `away` message.

Where's that quote from? fwiw, I 100% disagree with it. Setting an away status is fine, but if I join a channel, it's not at all trivial for me to see who is away and who isn't (although, this may just be the way I have my client set up.)

What quote? And yes, in my opinion some IRC clients have suboptimal defaults or missing support for this. It's a shame, but changing your nick to emulate a built in IRC command is in no way a solution. Away is standard, and every client should support it. In the end it's a question of the channels rules, but spamming nick-changes is annoying-- especially because people use different formats and simple filtering won't catch all cases. In addition it also breaks queries and might change your identity from a trusted nick to one that could be... everyone.

You're advocating using a hacky workaround that stems from client-side UI issues, instead of using a well-defined built in message. This just seems wrong to me, in every way.

Oh, i'm sorry, I thought your response also started with a >; I thought you were quoting something. My mistake.

And I agree that nickchanges can be annoying; I guess I've never been in a channel big enough where it was a significant issue.

And yeah, it's hacky - but given that IRC is fairly bare-bones, I think it's a good human-readable compromise. You can register your afk nickname as well, and notifications work just as well if you configure your client/bouncer to highlight them both (which I think most do by default anyway.)

I'm really not sure whether you're pulling some kind of a passive-aggressive "I'm being misquoted so badly that I refuse to even acknowledge it's a quote" routine, someone has edited their message, or you're genuinely not seeing it. At least currently the text after the ">" is a direct quote from the message it was a reply to (i.e. your initial message). It also seems pretty representative. If you disagree with that text 100%, it seems that you perhaps intended to write something else originally.

> this may just be the way I have my client set up

Two explanations are either yes, your client is configured to show active and away people the same; or other people aren't using the 'away' feature, so they show up as active 24/7. In the former case, fix your settings; in the latter case, it is other people who need encouragement to change - but encorage them to make use of the built-in away feature, don't encourage them to change their nicks :)

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