Frequently Asked Question

Ye Olde Way to Chat - IRC
Last Updated 5 years ago

IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is a long time popular way of chatting to many people at once, yes, there really was and still is a way to communicate with many other people, long before MySpace or facebook. It was very heavily used in the Gulf War era for people to get the truth out there without certain governments censoring.

IRC is an UN-MODERATED medium that's been around since the early 90's, most IRC Servers have local policies that are basically common sense, you can view these by typing /motd upon connecting to a network.

IRC works by channels, channels are created by users using the hash symbol, there are others like ampersand for local only channels, but if you're reading this, then you're too new to worry about those, and basically everyone only uses global channels, like #friends or #myplace .. whatever you want to call it really (within reason) many IRC servers provide nickname and channel registration services via bots or web pages.

You can do things like put a key on a channel (mode +k) This means only you're friends can enter if they know the key (password), you can make it so only registered nicknames can enter your channel, moderate the channel so only those with ops (+o) or voice (+v) can talk in public, it has ignore and silence ability, and a query option so you can enter into a continuous private chat with only one person, or use of a msg option so you can send a one off private message to someone, you can set it so your channel is private so when someone issues a /list to view all channels, your private chan, will not show up.

OK, lets say I want to connect to the UnderNet IRC server, my nickname (alias) will be Nobby and I want to join a channel and wait for my friends to come on and chat to me... so I'd type:

/server irc.undernet.org     

For further learning experiences we suggest you have a read of Undernet's Class tutorial 
Some channels on large networks may have many hundreds of users, it is best to learn your way in a smaller or private channel where you so wont be afraid of making a fool out of yourself, everyone needs to learn how to crawl before they can walk!


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