[CentOS] IRC telling you to go to mailing list - it's for good reason ....

Sun May 30 16:41:29 UTC 2010
R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com>

On Sun, 30 May 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:

> What's a drive-by, and until a post is made and answered 
> somewhere, how is a user supposed to know if a failure is 
> caused by something local (mix of software, internet 
> infrastructure), one repo mirror, or the basic 
> infrastructure?

Lemme change hats

Dunno that I know your 'nick', Les, nor have seen contribution 
by you in #centos IRC.  Is the CentOS' re-design on IRC a 
culture you understand via lurking a bit? [Clearly the earlier 
poster I trimmed down to respond to was not, as it clearly 
misstated some CentOS changes from 'bog standard' IRC 
practice]

First order answer:

A drive by is a person who pops into channel, does NOT read 
/topic, does NOT lurk for a minute or two, immediately asks a 
question fragment usually in 'l33t spe at k' or AOLbonics.  They 
will re-ask it 15 seconds later when an answer is not 
immediately offered.  If answered, it will turn out that there 
was some additional backstory such that the drive-by's queston 
was not well formed

Second order answer:

A 'serial' drive by is known by their 'nick' as such by the 
regulars who do the heavy listing in the change of adding 
substantive content, and as such, not treated as a priority to 
answer; Often we will see that 'nick' posting the same 
question as a cross-posting in parallel on several channels, 
or a referral to #centos from side projects of similar import 
or from forks (usually broken ones) unwilling to support their 
load, and so shifting it to us

-- Russ herrold