October 16, 2011

Easy Access?

Some IRC networks are very difficult to connect to during peak periods, so your choice of a trivia room may be restricted by this fact alone. Having overcome this problem, you are then faced with other problems of access:


1. are you voiced (+v) on start? #Anime_AM at Rizon; #cyberdate at DALnet; and #action at Rizon have special !voice commands that you need to perform on top of all of the other commands.


2. are you able to chat without a symbol? On #trivia at OperaNet, you need to type ' before any chat while a question is being asked. This makes spontaneous chat virtually impossible (but you do get a long break between question rounds to have a discussion).


3. no need to register? On #trivia at IRCstorm you are encouraged to register your nick for the best experience - and this may be annoying if you regularly change your nick, or just want a quick game of trivia. For regular players, however, it is highly advisable to join a network that does protect you from nukers, hackers and nickstealers. See Masking vs showing IP address


4. is the TrivBot format accessible by all irc clients? On #trivia at EFnet only certain IRC clients can read the format.


5. easily readable hint symbols? Some TrivBots use ---, *** or @@@ for hints. If your eyesight is not very good, the dash symbol can be difficult to read - and gets worse over time. Be warned!


6. is the Trivbot stable? Most Trivbots are regularly offline for a short period for maintenance, and a good OP will let you know when this happens; but some trivia channels have incredibly unstable bots for various reasons (#trivia at EFnet is one of them, see What are TrivMONs? ).


7. is the channel manager and/or OPs accessible? Many IRC trivia channels are run automatically by Bots, without OPs,and although there may be an e-mail address for contacting the manager, he/she never replies.(#trivia at EFnet is one of them).

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