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1. #apolyton often (constantly) gets visits by people who come in to ask a question, stick around for ten seconds or so, and disappear, never to be seen again. Those few who have the patience to wait a bit longer *do* tend to get an answer, since you have... dedicated people like I providing that service (for free, and no ads 
).
Thing is, it kind of annoys me to watch all of these people come and go, not knowing if they will ever actually get an answer or know where to look for it. I'd really appreciate it if you added a note to http://apolyton.net/misc/chat/ or somewhere else where it's likely be read saying something like this:
2. Your Java IRC client sucks. It spams the user with "unregistered evaluation copy" messages and has a horrible interface which spends bunches of screen real estate on useless crud like coloured text. Please replace it with something halfway decent like PJIRC instead. (if somebody else has better ideas, please bring them out - I just googled for "irc applet" and picked the first one that was free)
3. Fix that "people in the chat room:" bar on the forum already
. Or, rather, roll back your breaking of it. I promise not to play games with making announcements to the forum with /nick... much 
.
).Thing is, it kind of annoys me to watch all of these people come and go, not knowing if they will ever actually get an answer or know where to look for it. I'd really appreciate it if you added a note to http://apolyton.net/misc/chat/ or somewhere else where it's likely be read saying something like this:
Note that the regulars on #apolyton don't sit glued to their computer screens 24 hours a day. Please do not come in and ask a question and disappear ten seconds later. We're nice people, really, and we'd love to help, but we can't do it if you don't give us a little time to actually respond. Stay around for an hour or so - just leave the window open and go about your business, checking it for responses every now and then. That's what we do. It won't hurt, and it gives you a much greater chance that somebody actually is awake and active in that time period, and can help you.
-- Ari Rahikkala, one of the idlers
-- Ari Rahikkala, one of the idlers
3. Fix that "people in the chat room:" bar on the forum already
. Or, rather, roll back your breaking of it. I promise not to play games with making announcements to the forum with /nick... much .
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