No naked pings

What is a "naked ping"

It's when someone on IRC notifies a specific user and just says "ping":

<user> user2: ping

Why is it bad?

On "ping" etiquette

From: Adam Jackson <ajax redhat com>
To: memo-list redhat com
Subject: On "ping" etiquitte
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:21:30 -0500

IRC has developed a "ping" convention for getting someone's attention.
It works because most clients will highlight channels in which your name
has been mentioned, so something like

<joebob> ajax: ping

will make that channel show up pink instead of white for me [1].

I wish to correct, or at least amend, this behaviour.  The naked ping
should be Considered Harmful, for at least two reasons.  The first is
that it conveys no information.  The recipient of your ping, like you,
is a Busy Person.  They may be in the middle of something requiring
intricate thought, and should not be interrupted for anything less than
fire, flood, or six figures of revenue.  Worse, _you_ may forget why you
pinged someone; when, four hours later, your victim gets back to IRC and
responds to you, _you_ will be disrupted in turn trying to remember what
was on your mind in the first place.

The second, more subtle reason proceeds from the first.  A ping with no
data is essentially a command.  It's passive-aggressive; it implies that
the recipient's time is less valuable than yours. [2]  The pingee will
respond in one (or both) of two ways.  Either they will experience
increased stress due to increased unpredictable demands on their time,
or they will simply ignore naked pings.

The fundamental issue here is a misunderstanding of the medium.  IRC is
not a telephone.  It's volatile storage.  The whole reason the ping
works is because the client remembers seeing the ping, and can save it
in your history buffer so you can see who was talking to you and why.

The naked ping removes this context.

Please.  Save your time.  Save my time.  Make all of our lives more
efficient and less stressful.  Ping with data.  At a minimum:

<joebob> ajax: ping re bz 534027

See the difference?  Now you've turned slow, lockstep, PIO-like
interaction into smooth pipelineable DMA.  It's good for your hardware,
and it's good for you.

[1] - irssi 4 life.

[2] - Their time may well be less valuable than yours.  That's not the
point.  

- ajax

Solution

Don't use naked pings.