Slashdot Mirror

A long time ago, myself and a number of other people would link to a chat based program ("talker") on their slashdot sig. It went something like this:

uberworld.org

That was it. In short, it's a like a MUD, except it's full of people who sit around (mainly students and sysadmins) and chat about whatever they want all day. It's proper name is a "talker" and it used "telnet".

Now this is where the problem lies. I consider the interface to be obvious. You have a bunch of commands and help files called with "help" and it's all very easy.

But the people logging in from Slashdot, just didn't have a clue. And by that, I mean they had no idea what to do. These are people who use UNIX all day long and yet they were lost.

So I looked at the mistakes they made and I added handholding, better information, cleaned up the help files and stuff but STILL and this is the clincher: even then, people just didn't bother reading the information on the screen.

Even when you first log in, there are a couple of pages of information that tell you what to expect. When you actually "arrive" in the main room, you get told of the useful help file to read. Before you register if you type a command wrong, it again points you to that help file!

Most never even found the "say" command. They would log on, scrabble with a few commands, ignore the friendly points on the screen and the automated robot that pointed them to help files and in the end give up.

In the end, I now ask people who want to link, to actually point to a website (see my sig) in an effort to stop people logging on and being rather clueless.

So what am I saying here? Nothing can ever be too user friendly. But it's amazing (and sometimes amusing) to see that even those people who assume that they are cream of the crop when it comes to IT issues get totally and utterly lost using something that we have both 18 and 40 year olds using with little to no IT experience at all.

The problem comes about when there isn't enough testing. We learnt a lot from the confusion of slashdot people, but unfortunately you get to a point where you just cannot do any more but hope that users think for themselves.

(As an aside, if you can read and can handle telnet and some basic commands - you only need 20 odd to get started - then feel free to drop by and chat, website is here)

I help run a chat service called UberWorld. Its not quite like AOL in the fact that people with just standard telnet access can use it and its a little more complicated (10 basic commands to learn and you're away, but there is a total of 400 available plus many more depending on how long you use the place).

We used to run an 18+ only rule because people were free to talk about what they wanted. However this became more and more difficult to implement. Unlike AOL we don't have any way to link back peoples online names to addresses or personal details. Only thing we take is an email address for some of the features when you register (and you don't have to if you don't want to). People just lied, and we had no way of checking.

So we stopped it. It was simply being too difficult to police. So now we have a set of rules which are in general the sort of thing you'd expect to abide by in everyday life.

Occasionally we do get idiots, racists and homophobes or general nutcases who take delight in winding up people, but they tend to find that they are ganged up on and ridiculed off the place.

Self regulation.

Its a shame that AOL have to resort to draconian measure for this sort of thing, but there are strange people out there.

Strange people tend to do it to get the attention. They like it when people make a fuss and something happens. When they're totally ignored or ridiculed then they tend to give up and go elsewhere.

Granted we're not quite as popular as AOL (only 200 hard core users, most bored administrators and coders looking for some light conversation) but I'd hate to start implementing the sort of stuff AOL does if we did grow any bigger ...

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I help run a chat service called UberWorld. Its not quite like AOL in the fact that people with just standard telnet access can use it and its a little more complicated (10 basic commands to learn and you're away, but there is a total of 400 available plus many more depending on how long you use the place).

We used to run an 18+ only rule because people were free to talk about what they wanted. However this became more and more difficult to implement. Unlike AOL we don't have any way to link back peoples online names to addresses or personal details. Only thing we take is an email address for some of the features when you register (and you don't have to if you don't want to). People just lied, and we had no way of checking.

So we stopped it. It was simply being too difficult to police. So now we have a set of rules which are in general the sort of thing you'd expect to abide by in everyday life.

Occasionally we do get idiots, racists and homophobes or general nutcases who take delight in winding up people, but they tend to find that they are ganged up on and ridiculed off the place.

Self regulation.

Its a shame that AOL have to resort to draconian measure for this sort of thing, but there are strange people out there.

Strange people tend to do it to get the attention. They like it when people make a fuss and something happens. When they're totally ignored or ridiculed then they tend to give up and go elsewhere.

Granted we're not quite as popular as AOL (only 200 hard core users, most bored administrators and coders looking for some light conversation) but I'd hate to start implementing the sort of stuff AOL does if we did grow any bigger ...

--

I help run a chat service called UberWorld. Its not quite like AOL in the fact that people with just standard telnet access can use it and its a little more complicated (10 basic commands to learn and you're away, but there is a total of 400 available plus many more depending on how long you use the place).

We used to run an 18+ only rule because people were free to talk about what they wanted. However this became more and more difficult to implement. Unlike AOL we don't have any way to link back peoples online names to addresses or personal details. Only thing we take is an email address for some of the features when you register (and you don't have to if you don't want to). People just lied, and we had no way of checking.

So we stopped it. It was simply being too difficult to police. So now we have a set of rules which are in general the sort of thing you'd expect to abide by in everyday life.

Occasionally we do get idiots, racists and homophobes or general nutcases who take delight in winding up people, but they tend to find that they are ganged up on and ridiculed off the place.

Self regulation.

Its a shame that AOL have to resort to draconian measure for this sort of thing, but there are strange people out there.

Strange people tend to do it to get the attention. They like it when people make a fuss and something happens. When they're totally ignored or ridiculed then they tend to give up and go elsewhere.

Granted we're not quite as popular as AOL (only 200 hard core users, most bored administrators and coders looking for some light conversation) but I'd hate to start implementing the sort of stuff AOL does if we did grow any bigger ...

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