Connecting users to LoCo's via IRC

[Matthew East]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Jorge O. Castro<jorge at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Right now in our IRC clients when you launch them we autojoin them to
> #ubuntu. This makes the channel unwieldy, see
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-community/+bug/392799
>
> I was wondering how people felt about having the users join
> #ubuntu-COUNTRYCODE instead, so depending on your locale it would join
> you to that channel instead of #ubuntu. How do you feel about this,
> would it be useful for LoCo's or do you feel like you would get
> "spammed" by random users?

I don't think this would be a problem for those local teams that
provide irc support, but it's probably worth bearing in mind that not
all local teams do that. Plenty of the English speaking ones might
defer to #ubuntu for that. It would be necessary to maintain a list of
those that provide this support. And as others have mentioned, some
effort would be required to reconcile language codes with country
codes.

While I think it's a good idea in principle, and would work for
#ubuntu-it, the team I am contact of, I don't think it would solve
that bug. As far as I know we don't have any empirical evidence to
suggest that the auto-join is one of the causes of the popularity of
#ubuntu and my hunch is that those who go there seeking support do so
because they have heard or read about it somewhere.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF