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Irc
,→The people in channels
Many people will appear to be in the channel, but not all of them will actually be watching IRC at that moment. It is normal for people to leave their IRC clients connected forever and never leave. This way they can catch-up on conversations they missed while they were away.
Because of this, people will often check to see if someone is really there before talking to them. By convention, people will use the person's nick and ''ping'' or ''ping? '' instead of saying, "are you there?":
<don> funny_guy: ping