- What is #Help?
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#Help is an IRC (Internet Relay Chat, see "What is IRC and how can I get there?" below) channel on the EFnet IRC Network. The channel is currently maintained by United Networks, its members, and volunteers. The channel is a place for people to get answers to almost any question they want to ask. For more information see http://help.networks.org/.
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- Does #Help give help on anything?
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No, not anything, that would be impossible, but we do try to help with a very wide variety of subjects. We don't limit ourselves to IRC or computer related help, so questions like "How do I play poker?" are allowed, but stupid questions like "I just got shot, what do I do?" will get you kicked and possibly banned. Please keep in mind that we are not Gods (despite what you might hear on the grapevine) and therefore we cannot help with everything that comes up, but we do try our best. For a specific outline of what we do NOT help with read the question "Does #Help have any rules?" right below this one.
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- Does #Help have any rules?
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Yes, these are as follows:
- No bots other than UN (the United Networks bot) and occasionally MOP (Master of Puppets, another United Networks/Piker creation) are allowed in the channel.
- No script help. This rule is in place because many users want and use scripts to abuse other users or seek revenge on them. Kicking, banning, and ignoring is just as effective. Also, people asking for help with a script can be told by a malicious user to do something that could be harmful to their system and other users. The general feeling in #Help is that the best script is the one you write yourself, so we do provide help on ease of use and "friendly" scripting, on occasion.
- No bot help. We don't help with bots because they are used for evil 90% of the time, and they take resources from real users.
- No illegal help. This includes, but is not limited to, illegal mp3s, illegal movies, warez, gamez, appz, serialz, crackz, and hackz. Why? Because that stuff is illegal. That and we don't like the 14 year old users on AOL and their liberal use of the letter Z.
- No help through message, unless it's private or necessary. We help people in the channel so others can learn from watching. If someone comes in and asks how to get their mouse working someone with the same problem who might be too shy to ask watches and learns, and anyone else listening now knows how to help out with that problem if the solution given works.
- No abusing other users, for obvious reasons.
- No asking for ops. If you ask for ops, there's a 90% chance you'll never get them, and only certain ops have the ability to add other ops, so most of the time it's pointless anyway. We op people based on how much they help, how useful their help is, and how much they generally contribute to the channel. Please keep in mind that you don't need ops to help other people.
- No sucking up to the ops. If you read the rule before this and thought to yourself "I'll just suck up to the ops and they'll give me ops," you're wrong. It takes a very long time to earn ops, and we only issue ops if we need another op at the time.
- No trolls/stupid questions. Something like "My cat has turned against me, how do I stop it?" will get you kicked and possibly banned. Be intelligent about your questions please.
- No overly general questions, be specific. We understand that #Help is a place to ask questions, but asking us something like "Does anyone here have Win98?" doesn't help anyone. Try to be as specific as possible about your problem as you can, and try to fit it all into one readable line. There's a huge difference between "My modem isn't working, can anyone help?" and "My modem, a 56k USR Sportster, gives me the error 'No response from modem,' in Win98 when I try to dial, what can I do?"
- No useless file or search questions. Remember that no one in #Help is paid to be there and help people, so they expect you to at least try and help yourself with the easy stuff. Asking us for files or pages that could be found with a simple Web search isn't something we like, and it makes you look really lazy.
- No automatic scripts or commands of any kind, unless they're approved beforehand. This is a rule mostly for the operators. If you have an anti flood script/command that automatically kicks someone when they spit out 6 lines of text in under 10 seconds this would interfere with the normal operation of the channel. We could ask someone to paste 10 lines of HTML code or something in the channel and your script/command would kick them before they were done, and some people simply type fast. This also goes for anti idle and away messages and timers, which just fill the channel with needless text every so often.
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- Who are the ops in #Help?
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Because people change nicks, idle, get removed from #Help, etc., there is no list of #Help ops. There should be at least 10 ops in #Help at any given time, usually more, so just join the channel and find out.
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- What's #Help's purpose?
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Simply to help people who need help.
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- Why do you guys sit in #Help and help people all day?
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Because we're nice people and we believe that we're doing a good thing here. No, we don't get paid. We only get two benefits from doing it: 1. More knowledge and experience by learning things we didn't know by watching other people answer questions, and 2. That warm, special feeling you get inside when you know you've helped out another person. Yeah, we admit it, we have feelings, so sue us. :)
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- Who started #Help?
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Well, no one really knows who started the actual channel on EFnet first, but if you mean "Who thought of the idea of a #Help in the first place?" the answer to that is United Networks.
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- Can I access #Help from the Web, not through IRC?
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Not at this time, sorry.
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- What is IRC and how can I get there?
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IRC, which stands for Internet Relay Chat, provides users with real-time, worldwide chat. As of this writing EFnet, the IRC network #Help resides on, has a maximum limit of 96240 users and is comprised of 48 servers. You can find detailed instructions on getting on IRC for just about any platform at http://www.irchelp.org/ which also has a lot of other useful information about IRC.
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- What's #Help's official topic?
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The official topic for #Help is "JUST ASK! No script/bot/illegal/idle-chatter or msging ops" which meets the 80 character limit on EFnet.
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