Swhack FAQ - 2007 Edition

Swhack is a publically logged IRC channel where "off-topic" is often on-topic; where we discuss programming, typography, cryptography, linguistics, politics, whimsy, science, current affairs, and, well, whatever really. It's located on the Freenode IRC Network, and has been since Freenode was called Openprojects. Mmm... history...

History Corner

A Swhack comes into existence when lots of people get very bored in almost the same place, forming a critical mass of boredom expressing itself via an IRC channel. Actually that's only true of the Swhack Revival in 2004. The original Swhack, circa 2001, started because Aaron Swartz and Sean B. Palmer were talking about stuff they thought should be logged. Aaron suggested chatting in "#sbp", but Sean thought that was too egotistic, so instead Aaron came up with "Swhack!". It doesn't mean or stand for anything; it's onomatopoeic (so Aaron has always claimed).

Swhack is mainly just an IRC channel now, but in the olden days it had a weblog which we didn't particularly maintain. Once, I asked Aaron, in all seriousness: "Does a dog have Swhack nature?" Aaron retorted: "Shut up, you idiot!"

The Standard Introduction

When you join the channel, you should be greeted by some idiot saying something like "Hello, $name, and welcome to Swhack! This is a publically logged channel, so please be careful not to say anything that'll destroy your future potential political career. Further information at swhack.com" If not then, well, count yourself lucky. Or unnoticed.

The Bots

There are quite a few bots on Swhack. You can tell which of the members are bots because they're voiced, though some of the unvoiced members are bots too because they've been missed. Some of the voiced members may be regular members who have been voiced by ChanServ because of their priviliges, too, so actually pay no attention to the voicing if you want to be sure about such things. Nobody ever said that this wasn't a rule of thumb. (It's a rule of thumb.)

So, the bots: phenny is the most useful bot on the channel because we use it to Google things (".g something"), Googlecount things (".gc something"), find etymologies (".ety something"), look up unicode codepoints (".cp something"), and rate things (".rate something"). Monty is the second most useful bot on the channel because he doesn't do anything useful. Just say something to him, addressing him by name, and you'll see what I mean. He is fun though. We also have, at the moment, dahut (a perl bot), eel (an E bot for evaluating E), Emeka (some kind of Semantic Web thing), lisppaste2 (for pasting stuff into the channel; do "lisppaste2: url?" instead!), loggy (logs the channel; except for lines starting with [off]), supybot (gets on our nerves), swhask (a Haskell interpreter), and teddybot (sits there and does nothing; just ignore it).

Swhack Charter and Rules

We've come up with lots of stupid rules and charters and things for Swhack, none of which we follow, and some of which are funny. Here's as many as we can remember:

One List to Male Them All

Christopher Schmidt is, in his own words "the king of the mailing list", which he rules "with an iron fist of justice". Join the mailing list for fun and games. We don't use it very often, so you'll have to provide the fun and games yourself. (Seriously, join it! Chris will have to confirm you, so give us a ping on channel first.)

Fun and Games

There are two ircgames that we play in Swhack: № 1) The Googlecount Game, and № 2) n00bpwnage. You'll probably want to know how to play them if you're crazy enough to want to join the channel, eh? Don't worry, the rules are flexible to the point of nomic. THE POINT OF NOMIC, I TELL YOU.

The Googlecount Game
Players take it in turns to Googlecount (that is, find out how many results there are for something) words or phrases using phenny or another similarly functional IRC bot. Each successive word or phrase must be some kind of joke or derivation or other wordplay from the previous turn; and its Googlecount must be higher. We haven't really settled on what happens in the case of an exact same Googlecounting. You're not allowed to use Google to form your questions in advance; the fun comes from the wordplay and the surprise at losing yet again for the fiftieth time in a row (grumble). Generally by convention the first turn should be as low a Googlecount as possible, between 1 and 1000 inclusive if possible. Example first turn: "hairpin terns".
n00bpwnage
The first n00b we remember being pwned on Swhack was neo85. Since then, we have pwned many a n00b. Essentially, we get a lot of people coming to the channel thinking that it's a "hacking" (i.e. cracking) channel and wanting to get l33t sploits and so on. Generally we just troll their asses of and try to eke as much humour from them as possible before they leave. They all do leave eventually, but sometimes it takes a while and we have a good old laugh along the way. So we turn the usual IRC annoyance of having idiots coming along and ruining the channel into a kind of sport where everyone has a laugh and the "victim", or rather the person that would usually be causing the problem, is usually not clever enough to be any the wiser, to use an inadvertantly transparent idiom in the context. Sorry.

Utilities

If you get embroiled into a time travel discussion on Swhack and get backed into a shotten nook, try extricating yourself by using the subjunctive future causal past verb tense. It's very straightforward to deploy, as the following sentence demonstrates: "I would have had been born, but I have had will give my father a vasectomy".

Trivia

Our favourite Unicode characters are:

Also, if you're having problems reconstituting your schwas, you're not alone! But Swhack is probably not the best place to get help for that.

Schematisation What is Swhack? It's the cauldron of Morbus's fluids. The fuck?

This FAQ was compiled mostly from the back of old sugar packets by Sean B. Palmer, 2007-05-06.