a tiny guide to IRC
Saturday, January 12th, 2008I was a bit sick for the last couple of days and I still don’t feel like moving around too much tonight, so I figured I might as well come up with a useful blog post. So this is it: a tiny guide to IRC.
There are quite a few good IRC tutorials, but I thought that this might still be useful for someone. I am aware that I am a bit off-topic here, but I couldn’t think of another place to publish it (I know this should probably go in a wiki, unfortunately I don’t have access to one that is appropriate for this kind of content
).
The following commands have been tested on freenode, though they might work for other networks as well. I am using the brackets ‘[’ and ‘]’ as placeholders, so this is where your input goes.
talking to the nick name service nickserv
- register your current nick name:
/msg nickserv register - change your current nick name:
/nick [nick] - recover your registered nick when someone else is currently using it:
/msg nickserv recover [nick] [password] - each time you connect, sign in with your registered nick (most irc clients will do that for you):
/msg nickserv identify [password]
getting an invitation and using it
- get an invitation (this is normally done by either asking the channel operator personally to add you or) by sending a message to the channel operator [nick]:
/msg [nick] [please add me to the channel] - invite a user to a channel (only the channel operator will need this command)
/invite [nick] [#channel] - “show” your invitation before joining:
/cs invite [#channel]
joining a channel
- just type:
/join [#channel]
talking to the channel service chanserv
Sometimes you will get the following message:
[#channel]: You need to be a channel operator to do that
These commands might be useful in that case:
- get channel operator status:
/cs op [#channel] or /mode [#channel] +o [nick] - remove channel operator status from [nick] ([nick] can be you as well):
/mode [#channel] -o [nick] - give voice to [nick] (mainly used on moderated channels, use the option -v to remove voice from [nick]):
/cs voice [#channel] [nick] or /mode [#channel] +v [nick]
other useful commands
- change the channel topic:
/topic [#channel] [this is the new topic] - Kicking users:
/kick user [#channel] [reason] - Banning Users:
/mode [#channel] +b [usermask] [reason] type "/userhost [nick]" to get the nick's usermask)
irc clients
(See wikihow for a more extensive list)
- Linux: X-Chat, or the more convenient version XChat-gnome. Pidgin still has some issues with some of the IRC commands, so I’d wait for the bug fixes before using it.
- Mac: Colloquy
Each IRC client can be configured to display a notification when someone is trying to contact you or even for some specific keywords. Other configuration options include:
No more excuses for not using IRC, innit?