quote:

ORIGINAL: domiguy

Can you get moderated in a chat room?

• Read the topic/description of the room! You may also get a message from the room when you join with further information. Nothing is more irritating than someone who joins and in their first 3 messages breaks the guidlines in the channel topic and other info messages - read them and take them to heart. Also if it is your first time in the room and the topic mentions a web address for rules, take some time to familiarise yourself with the rules.
  
• Dramatics - entering the room and telling everyone that "I kneel humbly before all the mistresses and beg for permission to enter and speak" ... well, guess what? You just did enter and speak! Most rooms don't require this and indeed in many it is frowned upon to varying degrees. However, some rooms DO require this. Generally you can tell the attitude toward this sort of thing from the room description (topic)
• Trolling - posting messages like "I am a 20yo m sub from uk seek x, y and z". Generally also frowned on, but I guess if there are match making rooms then it could be OK. Again channel topic will generally hint at the attitude of people towards this behaviour.
  This is frowned on as your profile is sopposed to do the talking for you, so additional adverts in the chat are as annoying as they are on TV.
  
• Arguing pointlessly with channel ops (people with . or an "at" symbol [for some reason it gets censored if I type it here] in front of their names) - mostly if you've violated a rule, you'll be warned by an op. Don't argue with this, as you won't win. If you think you've a valid reason to protest your warning ask to PM the op, but don't argue in channel. This brings me on nicely to
• Ask to PM (private message) people. In just about every channel I have seen, no one wants conversation windows popping up unexpectedly, so ask the person you want to talk to in the channel before opening a pm.
• Emoticons/Sounds - the Java IRC client provided on the main website has a number of rather irritating emoticons (smileys) and sounds which a user can send to the room -- everyone else also hears these sounds and sees the emoticons, so in many channels they are prohibited. If the room description doesn't mention a rule about this, it would be best to not use them anyway.
• Idling - joining the chat and just sitting there doing nothing. Most channels don't mind this (to a certain extent) however a few insist that you participate or leave. Again pay attention to the channel topic upon entry. Also it's useful to anyone who might want to get in touch with you if you mention that you are going away from keyboard (AFK) for any length of time, so just mention in channel "afk for a while, need to get lunch" if you think there's a chance anyone may wish to contact you. Obviously don't go too overboard - we don't need or want to know if you're going over to turn the light on, or just going to adjust your chair or whatever :)
• Drivebys - you do a drive-by on a chatroom when you join it and leave almost immediately. It's rather annoying as it scrolls everyone's chat window up two lines (join & part), or more if you say "hi" then leave and so on. The Java client especially I think has limited scroll-back space so if this happens frequently or in fast moving rooms, it becomes hard to track the conversation. Most places will give you a warning or two then you'll find yourself banned.
  You can see how many people are in the room and what the topic is before you even join - so in theory you should never find yourself joining a room you wouldn't want to be in.