This being HN, I'd love to hear from one of the many IRC channel mods who literally typed (I'd guess copy/pasted) this kind of text into their chat room topics and auto-responders.

If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years?

To be clear, I'm taking OP's experience as a common case of IRC newbies at that time on many channels. I certainly experienced something like it (though I can't remember the exact text), and I've read many others post on HN about the same behavior from the IRC days.

Edit: clarifications

I think a lot of unpaid online discussion forum moderation volunteers get psychic profit from power tripping.

Give a man a little power.

> social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years

Oh my, this reminded me how some 20 years ago I was a high school kid and dared to install a more nerdy Linux distro (which I won't name here) on my home computer. After some big upgrade, the system stopped booting, and when in panic I asked for help at the official forum, I got responses that were shaming me for blindly copying commands from their official website without consulting some README files. That's how I switched to Debian and never looked back.

>If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years?

I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance. But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)...

... I'm kinda envious.

Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software.

There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else.

Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation).

But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.

> was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years?

Maybe that was the point?

To be fair, after the ban expired, I started submitting the test cases as instructed and the community was very helpful under these constraints.

Are you saying it worked?

Well, the tone was unnecessarily rude, and the ban period was excessive, but after complying, they were very helpful.

> do not use natural language questions

That is really absurd! AFAIK, it is not possible to pose a question to a human in C++.

This level of dogmatism and ignorance of human communication reminds me of a TL I worked with once who believed that their project's C codebase was "self-documenting". They would categorically reject PRs that contained comments, even "why" comments that were legitimately informative. It was a very frustrating experience, but at least I have some anecdotes now that are funny in retrospect.

Self-documenting code is one of the worst ideas in programming. Like you, I've had to work with teams where my PRs would be blocked until I removed my comments. I'm not talking pointless comments like "# loop through the array" but JSdoc style comments describing why a function was needed.

I will no longer work anywhere that has this kind of culture.

Hard to agree or disagree without real examples. I've worked with people who insist on writing paragraphs of stories as comments on top of some pretty obviously self-descriptive code. In those cases, the comments were indeed just clutter that would likely soon be out of date anyway. Conversely, places that need huge comments like that usually should just be refactored anyway. It's pretty rare to actually need written comments to explain what's going on when the code is written semantically and thoughtfully.

To be clear, I'm not talking about self-indulgent essays embedded in comments. I'm talking about comments that convey context for humans.

Here's a made-up example:

    // Parses a Foo message [spec]. Returns true iff the parse was successful.
    // The `out` and `in` pointers must be non-null.
    //
    // [spec]: https://foo.example/spec
    bool parse_foo(foo_t* out, const char* in, size_t in_len) {
      assert(out);
      assert(in);

      // TODO(tracker.example/issue#123) Delete the Foo v1 parser. Nobody will
      // be sending us Foo v1 message when all the clients are upgraded to Bar
      // v7.1.
      //
      // Starting in Foo v2, messages begin with a two-byte version identifier.
      // Prior to v2, there was no version tag at all, so we have to make an
      // educated guess.
      //
      // For more context on the Foo project's decision to add a version tag:
      // https://foo.example/specv2#breaking-change-version-tag
      uint16_t tag_or_len;
      if (!consume_u16(&tag_or_len, &in, &in_len)) {
        return false;
      }
      if (tag_or_len == in_len) {
        return parse_foo_v1(out, in, in_len);
      }
      return parse_foo_v2(out, in, in_len);
    }

On that old project, I believe the TL would have rejected each of these comments on the grounds that the code is self-documenting. I find this to be absurd:

(1) Function comments are necessary to define a contract with the caller. Without it, callers are just guessing at proper use, which is particularly dangerous in C. Imagine if a caller guessed that the parser would gracefully degrade into a validator when `out` is NULL. (This is a mild example! I'm sure I could come up with an example where the consequence is UB or `rm -rf /`.)

(2) The TODO comment links to the issue tracker. There's no universe in which a reader could have found issue#123 purely by reading the code. On the aforementioned project, we were constantly rediscovering issues after wasting hours/days retreading old territory.

(3) Regarding the "Starting in Foo v2" comment... OK, fine, maybe this could have been inferred from reading the code. But it eases the reader into what's about to happen while providing further context with a link. On balance, I think this kind of "what" comment is worth including even though it mirrors the code.

A one week ban on the first message is clearly gatekeeping. What a bunch of jerks. A 1 hour ban would have been a lot more appropriate, and escalate from there if the person can't follow the rules.

Don't even get me started about how dumb rule 2 is, though. And rule 3 doesn't even work for normal English as many things are abbreviated, e.g. this example.

And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez.

I'm 100% sure I'd never have gone back after that rude ban.

"I'm 100% sure I'd never have gone back after that rude ban."

upon saying this, the young apprentice was enlightened

> And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez.

I'm pretty sure that "rule" was more aimed towards "just ask your question" rather than "greet, make smalltalk, then ask your question".

I have similar rules, though I don't communicate them as aggressively, and don't ban people for breaking them, I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been. It's a lot easier if you send the question you have instead of sending "Hi, how are you?" and then wait for 3 minutes to type out your question.

He did send the question. In the same message. It's just that he was polite about it. He didn't send a greeting and wait for a response before continuing.

> I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been.

Yep, it's in there with "please use the public channel rather than DMs".

Some nettiquite, please.

Of course, in the process of typing out their question, they usually find the answer on their own.

That contradiction is funny, tho:

> - do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit

and

> do not abbreviate words (you have abbreviated "you" as "u"); if you do not have time to type the words, we do not have time to read them

So they have apparently enough time to read full words, it seems!

I think reading “u” takes longer than reading “you”.

With “u”, I have to pause for a moment and think “that’s not a normal word; I wonder if they meant to type ‘i’ instead (and just hit a little left of target)?” and then maybe read the passage twice to see which is more likely.

I don’t think it’s quite as much a contradiction. (It still could be more gruff than needed.)

probably a generational thing, I process that and other common texting/internet abbreviations exactly like normal words.

Yh u gtta b c00l w abbrvs

The noobs don't got how we get where we get?

edit: I remember how some communities changed into: The help isn't good enough, you should help harder, I want you to help me by these conventions. Then they leave after getting their answer and no one has seen them ever again rather than join the help desk.

I learned a bunch of programming languages on IRC, and the C and C++ communities on freenode were by far the most toxic I've encountered.

Now that Rust is succesfully assimilating those communities, I have noticed the same toxicity on less well moderated forums, like the subreddit. The Discord luckily is still great.

It's probably really important to separate the curmudgeons from the fresh initiates to provide an enjoyable and positive experience for both groups. Discord makes that really easy.

In the Ruby IRC channel curmudgeons would simply be shot down instantly with MINASWAN style arguments. In the Haskell IRC channel I guess it was basically accepted that everyone was learning new things all the time, and there was always someone willing to teach at the level you were trying to learn.

Not my experience. IRC was 'toxic' since forever, but that't not a toxicity, that's inability to read emotion through transactional plan text. Once one account that in the mental model IRC is just fine.