More signal, less noise

When I'm not in sweet, sweet bed, I tend to live in one of two places - the Internet or Outside. It's always been a bit of a toss-up as to whether I should qualify things with 'IRL' and have people assume I'm talking about the Internet otherwise, or whether I should say 'online..' and have people think I'm talking about 'the outside' unless I say otherwise. This applies to conversations via any medium.

The introduction of #xkcd-signal however, has clarified all of that for me. Unless I explicitly state otherwise, anything I say refers to my life online, from now on. I've been drawn back into the clinging, soul-leeching world of IRC again by a simple, but absolutely brilliant concept.


_{I love XKCD}

The chat channel #xkcd-signal is governed by the almighty Robot9000 ["The most generic, unoriginal name for a bot that we could think of"], and the mission and purpose of that robot is to prevent decay in the signal to noise ratio.

To that effect, it will mute anyone who types a sentence which has ever been typed before in that channel.

They threw in the logs from another channel too, so there's now about 2million lines of conversation logged. Say anything which matches one of these lines, and you're muted for 4 seconds. Re-offend, and it's 16 seconds...and up and up and up. There is a decay too though, but anyone who gets a bit too ahead of themselves with "lol", ":)" or "hai guys" is likely to spend a few days in silence.

It's great fun to play chicken with (they're not a humble lot, I managed to get away with "Looks like I'm wrong") and you'd be amazed at how long a full conversation, with no cheating (adding in pointless words etc - do that and a live moderator will mute you) can go on without a single sentence repeated. The guy behind the idea thinks we could go on for a decade with no real problems.

Connection details, more background and reasoning can be found on the XKCD blag - highly worth a read (and not just for that post).

The whole thing, by the way, is written in perl, which is awesome. I've started learning it myself, and it's so cool to have, amongst other things, a postfix unless:

print "We have no bananas" unless $bananas;

Not quite as cool as lisp, but much more useful:


_{Clickety-click click click}