(So I’m here in Seattle for the Gnomedex 6.0, and will be blogging about it here)
Note to Chris (Pirillo): You can encourage people to talk in your “preferred environment”, but don’t stifle their actions when they choose to go elsewhere.
The official Gnomedex IRC channel is at irc.wyldryde.org/#lockergnome. Fair enough, but I don’t really want to snark in the “official backchannel”.
So a few of us headed over to our good friends at irc.freenode.net and connected to #gnomedex. We joined the channel (which already exisited) and then got the following message:
(11:37:15) ChanServ: (notice) [#gnomedex] The Official Gnomedex 6.0 channel is exclusively in #lockergnome at irc.wyldryde.org ( /server -m irc.wyldryde.org -j #lockergnome)
…which I obviously ignored. But then I found out that the channel had been registered and owned by a ChanServ bot (presumably owned/operated by Gnomedex people)… And get this: set to stop anyone from posting to it!
They had actually gone into what they had identified as a “rival” to their official channel and blocked it!
That’s really not nice. Please don’t do that.
THe whole set up is annoying. I went first to the freenode channel, expecting it to be there (which seems to be normal practice) but no, all locked off. I can’t connect to wyldryde through my client and the web based stuff is patchy at best.