looking east

I 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

• Windows: Miranda, Mirc or XChat for a more command-line like interface

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?