[Russian, literally "teapot"] Almost synonymous with {muggle}.
Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn,
but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure
time as {newbie} and is not as derogatory as {luser}. Both a novice
user and someone using a system for a long time without any
understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks. Very
widespread term in Russian hackish, often used in an English context
by Russian-speaking hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. "Our new colleague
is a complete chainik"). FidoNet discussion groups often had a
"chainik" subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg.
su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects
often have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the
developers' and experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is
slowly slipping into mainstream Russian due to the Russian
translation of the popular yellow-black covered "foobar for dummies"
series, which (correctly) uses "chainik" for "dummy", but its
frequent (though not excessive) use is still characteristic
hacker-speak.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {luser}{muggle}{newbie}]