Official TS chat room?

[Jake]

Any interest in hosting an "official" Talk Stats IRC room? Would be simple enough for someone to host (although unfortunately I don't have the resources to do it) and we could simply post the login info in a sticky for minimal effort. Or if we wanted, there are ways to integrate the chat room with the forum software so that anyone can connect via a link on the toolbar. That approach could be especially useful for our many "single serving members" who could just drop in and get help from multiple members in real time.

But I'm curious to see first of all if people think a chat room would be worthwhile in the first place.

 

[Dason]

I wouldn't mind seeing one. It would be interesting to have the ability to have an actual conversation with some of the members here.

 

[Dason]

I really would like to see this happen at some point. I don't know how much traffic it would get but I would probably hang out in it quite often. It might be a nice place to be a little less formal for some of the more frequent users of TS and it would be a nice place for people who might want some more immediate help - although I'm guessing being too pushy probably wouldn't bode too well for people looking for help.

 

[spunky]

i second that idea... i know my input on the board hasnt been what it used to be before (the semester is REALLY killing me) but i've enjoyed quite a bit the discussions that we've been having, either from threads created for that purpose (like the probit VS logit) or when we sometimes hijack other people's posts and start to taking them in all different directions, learning a lot in the process...

 

[bugman]

I third that idea. Nice one Jake!

 

[Jake]

My experience with freenode.net is fairly limited, but I think we could use that site to pretty easily set up an official IRC space. It may even be pretty easy from there to add a webchat link on our forum toolbar that would easily connect users to our freenode IRC room. Might be worthwhile for you administrative types to look into it a little...

 

[Dason]

I don't really use IRC enough and don't feel like I should be the one to create a persistent channel. But if anybody feels like chatting I've been on irc tonight for various reasons so if you want you can find me on the irc.foonetic.net server on channel #talkstats

 

[spunky]

so... what is IRC?

 

[Dason]

internet relay chat

It's an old protocol that still gets used (it seems it's more in use with techy people especially for tech type support)

But it's essentially a way to create chat rooms.

 

[Dason]

Spunky if you just wanted to give it a try...

If you use firefox you can download the "chatzilla" add on which is a usable irc client.

After you get it installed you should have an option "chatzilla" in the "Tools" option on your menu bar - if you're using the new menu bar where everything is in the upper left then I don't actually know how to access it.

After that once it's loaded I believe these commands should work for you

/server irc.foonetic.net
/nick spunky
/join #talkstats

That will get you connected to the foonetic server, change your nickname to spunky, and join the talk stats channel. If you plan on using irc more you should probably register the nickname spunky so people can't pretend to be you.

/msg nickserv register password spunky@gmail.com

That will register your current nickname (which you should have changed to spunky) on the foonetic server so that you need the password "password" to use that nickname. It will send and email to spunky@gmail.com to confirm and it will tell you a command to enter. Of course you should change all the values to reflect what you actually want.

 

[Dason]

Three hours and no visitors. Oh well.

 

[Jake]

Okay I've written enough today, I'll hop in.

 

[Dason]

Jake and I had the very first conversation in the #talkstats channel on server: irc.foonetic.net

It was a success! Since then I took the liberty to register the channel with chanserv so the channel will remain there and I have it set up so that there shouldn't be the possibility of an outsider taking over the channel. Unfortunately right now I'm the only one who can be an op on the channel so I'll hang out on there for a while and if any of the other mods (or just other contributors) hope on I'll give op status to. Like I said I'm not the most experienced IRC user so if you have any suggestions just let me know.

Edit: Actually if you think you want to be an op on the channel and have an nick registered on foonetic's nickserv let me know and I can make it so that you're automatically added as an op when you enter the channel.

 

[spunky]

well... up until today, i had never used firefox, neither knew what irc is but thanks to your suggestions i realised it's actually super-duper easy to get in! i'll try and either catch you or jake or someone else on it tomorrow (sorry for not logging in today. it's thanksgiving weekend up here in canada and thinks are kinda busy, lols...)

anyways, thanks for this great opportunity and i hope i see all the regulars (and not-so-regulars as well) up there at some point!

cheerZZ!

 

[Dason]

May I ask which browser you were using before? And I'll mention that there are a lot of different ways to access IRC - I just assumed you had firefox installed so chatzilla was easy enough to recommend.

 

[Jake]

I didn't want to hassle with downloading a client (I'm using Chrome) so I just used mibbit.com. Works well enough for me.

 

[spunky]

May I ask which browser you were using before? And I'll mention that there are a lot of different ways to access IRC - I just assumed you had firefox installed so chatzilla was easy enough to recommend.

internet explorer...lol. thing is, although i tend to spend a lot of time in the comptuer, aside from R and some other programs i use for statistical calculations, i dont really use the computer much for anything outside the usual checking emails and going on youtube... i knew about firefox but since explorer gives me everything i need for my very basic usage of the internet, i never considered downloading it... although now i just found out i can be on two different yahoo email accounts at the same time as long as i use different browsers... which is gonna make my job a lot easier! so thanks for that as well!

so... i'm guessing using chatzilla would be the easiest way to access the talkstats channel if i dont plan on doing anything fancy there on IRC?

 

[Dason]

You're breaking my heart using IE...

It's better than it used to be... but still...

 

[spunky]

aw... i'm sorry!

thing is i'm such a n00b when it comes to computers that if it were not for R and the latent variable modelling/IRT software that i use, my only use for a computer would be as a glorified typing machine, heh. i've had to become a little fancier lately and learn about how to parallel-process stuff to prevent death-by-expectation-maximisation (i wanna finish my thesis before i turn 80 while waiting for all the iterations to finish, lol)... but, aside from that, i dunno. i think my older brother has his share of the blame here. he's a very, very good systems engineer (in my opinion) so everytime the comptuer turned funky, big bro would come to the rescue!

so... what's super bad about IE that i should switch to firefox? (i mean, lots of people are doing it so i bet there are quite a few good reasons...)

 

[Dason]

so... what's super bad about IE that i should switch to firefox? (i mean, lots of people are doing it so i bet there are quite a few good reasons...)

I actually use chrome most of the time but I prefer firefox to IE anyday. IE has significantly improved the past few years but I still don't like it and there are quite a few faults. Plus it's a microsoft product and tends to not be as tight on security as firefox or chrome (although neither of those are perfect either).

This is a decent relatively new breakdown that compares chrome, firefox, IE, opera, and safari against each other in a bunch of different areas. I linked to the last page: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html where it crowns a winner and a slight overview. If you want to read the whole thing (17 pages :s ) here is the first page and probably the place to start: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html.

You can evaluate what you use your browser for the most and what is important to you and see how the different browsers compare. Then again familiarity is quite important to some people so it might be that you just want to stick with IE and I would understand (although not agree with) that.