Is this a common occurance at #linode? When I leave work I set my nick to tsmart_gone and it changes across all channels. I was recently kicked out for that:


What gives? Is this the way linode treats customers?

Is this reason enough to ban a customer? I think they can get over the fact that I tell people I went home from work. That's policy where I work, and I'm not going to make an exception for linode. I think it would be better for them to not kick customers who, not intending to *spam* anyone with messages, tell people they are not at their desk (i.e. so ppl @ work will know not to come to your desk).

While this may be policy where you work, the opposite policy (namely that away messages and status nick changes are spam) is in effect on Linode IRC. The fact that the former has one policy does not mean you can carry it over to the latter.

If you want to set yourself as away, do so. But you do not need to automatically announce that to the channel. This way, if someone wishes to contact you, they can easily discover your away-ness, without the rest of us having to see that you went from "guyonirc-onthepotty" to "guyonirc-eatingabagel".

That said, I'd bet you've already been unbanned, or would be shortly if you email or ticket Linode.

Stated where?

Well it looks like they won't budge on the issue, so I'll prob be taking biz elsewhere. A silly rule as now I can't get support from them, and this for the irc user's "convenience". Why someone would expect a personal response from someone named XXXXX_gone or XXXX_away is beyond me, but it sounds like a personal preference of the ops.

That's too bad, I was about to write an article post on how to get a custom distro onto Linode (specifically targeting RHEL/CentOS) -- the docs are a little out of date for that.

When you have a channel of many hundreds of people that already has a lot of scroll, having people that insist on changing their names & adding clutter to the channel instead of doing /away adds up. Plus 99.99% of the people don't care if you are there or not unless you are talking in which case a manual hey i'll brb to whoever you are talking works fine.

You could also just go in the channel when you need something or are there and leave if you absolutely refuse to stop the nick changes

So why dont you disable showing nick changes in your IRC client if you dont want to see them. You shouldn't punish users for a (retarded) policy that isn't shown anywhere.

Nick Changes sounds like the name of a detective in a cheesy novel.

James

You are going to let a little thing like this become a big enough issue to take your business elsewhere? There are other official and unofficial avenues for support. IRC isn't the only means.

Yes. I Was starting to feel like part of the community and now I have been shunned. I am not married to linode, but had heard good things about them on hacker news. There's not much they can do that others can't for a similar price.

Why not open up an actual support ticket with Linode so a staff member can actually answer this? Nobody that has replied so far is a Linode staff member, nor has anyone pointed to actual written policy.

I am away (meeting).

brb

I didn't know they had an irc channel, cool.