No Open Blockers

I sit multiple chat rooms for work, spanning two IRC servers: internal Red Hat and Freenode. We use nick name changes to reflect status, for instance “jdob[lunch]” or “jdob[getting-beer]“. The default behavior of the /nick command (used to change your nickname, natch) is just for the server on which you executed it. What happens is I inevitably forget to change the nick on one of the servers, either leaving me at lunch for hours on end or making it look like I’m working at 9pm (which, let’s be honest, doesn’t happen nearly as often as my unchanged nickname would reflect).

I asked in the #spacewalk room if anyone on my team knew how to change the nicknames across servers. No one knew, but a bunch seemed to want the same functionality for the same reasons as I did.

I hopped in the #xchat room on Freenode.

[jdob] hey all... random question... is there a way to set my nick across multiple servers at the same time?
[Khisanth] jdob: /allserv nick newnick would change it on every server


Done. It took me 10 seconds to locate a community of XChat users and draw from their expertise. I didn’t even have to google around for the community; Freenode is a pretty common location for that sort of thing. I have no idea who Khisanth is, but it doesn’t matter if he/she is a developer or just a user, the community was there, accessible, and knowledgeable. That rocks.