[TriLUG] Jabber usernames

[Aaron Joyner]

Jeff Groves wrote:
> I'm not sure I follow your line of thought concerning "IRC presuming you 
> are already in the same channel".  I know that in any (compliant) IRC 
> client, all I have to do is connect to the server, do a /list to see all 
> of the channels or do a /whois <nick> to find someone.
> 
> I have yet to find either such feature for Jabber in Trillian or Gaim.  
> Am I missing something?  It seems that with Jabber, you just "have to 
> know" and it's not going to help you find it.

The key point (which has already been made, but not this explicitly) is 
that to make any use of /whois, you must know the person's nick. 
Knowing someone's IRC nic is analogous to knowing their jabber UID 
(except jabber UIDs are usually more logical).  Often, a user's email 
address (which they're posting to TriLUG with) is their JUID (although 
that's not entirely the case yet, and isn't quite for trilug, it's an 
easy deduction if you're familiar with Jabber).

So in short, if you don't know someone's IRC nic, and you're on a 
relatively busy server (which any Freenode node qualifies as), you're 
going to have a heluva time locating them also.  Try deducing some of 
the IRC names used by TriLUG members, such as nilbus, admiralfrijole, 
alchemist, etc.  Heck, my IRC name of many moons ago used to always be 
"Laughs".  :)  By contrast, things like jbroome at jabber.trilug.org, 
jbebel at jabber.mybox.org, asjoyner at jabber.mybox.org, etc are often much 
easier to deduce from just the email address the person posts with 
(myself being a little bit of an exception).

Less babling, more packing.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner