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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Just curious how many members a technically inclined and might find it fun to try IRC for chat.

If you search this forum on XIRCON you will locate my post on how to connect to IRC at the SlashNET server and chat in #brokeback which is a channel (chat room) that I created last night.

I finished my IRC experiment at 4am, and left it runnng, with logging on, to capture any visits/posts, but I can report that no one came, neither friend nor foe, nor even a wolf with apple-sized anatomy.

If folks want something super simple, then here is a CBOX chat box that you can try out at a page at my site. It is real time, quite simple, and no easy way to log profound dialogues about truth, beauty and the Canadian way.

I am also looking around at free web base / java based chats

http://www.thefreesite.com/Free_Software/free_chat_programs/

Here is one with no advertising and an IRC component

http://www.freejavachat.com/

Supposedly it is as easy as this:

http://www.freejavachat.com?chan=brokeback

Let's try it out and see!

It works fine! You may change the above URL from brokeback to any room/channel name of your choice.

There are ways to secure your nick with a password and secure your channel with a password, and establish yourself as founder, owner of your channel.

I was able to register the channel #brokeback to my nick Sitaram with the following command

/msg chanserv register #brokeback yourpassword brokeback channel

You simply issue valid IRC commands into the chat room and they are executed by the server

If you join and are assigned a random name like @Visitor99 you may type /nick Ennis and your nick now becomes Ennis, if no one else owns it

You may then REGISTER your nick and secure it with a password by typing

/msg NickServ REGISTER yourpassword youremail@yahoo.com

Obviously, replace yourpassword with the secret password of your choice and youremail@yahoo.com with your actual email address.

You will promptly receive in your email a special command code, which you must paste into the chat room, to complete validation and registration

You may then secure your channel name with the following command, which make you the founder owner of the channel

I was able to register the channel #brokeback to my nick Sitaram with the following command

/msg chanserv register #brokeback yourpassword brokeback channel

You will notice in my signature that there is now a URL to click to join #brokeback channel.

This free java client which automates much of IRC, and makes installation of XIRCON unnessary, seems to be an excellent way for our message board to get our feet wet with a real time chat room.

If our admin/founder Ethan takes an interest in this, then of course I shall transfer power and control to Ethan. Or, Ethan may care to experiment, and impliment his own channel.

Here is how to change your IRC nick email address

/msg nickserv set email <newaddresshere>

here is how to change your IRC nick password

/msg nickserv set password yournewpassword

So, to summarize and recap, when you click on the link above (or in my signature) you enter the room as some random nick like vistor123

Step 1

/nick yourdesired nick

Step 2
If you have not registered your nick with a password then type

/msg NickServ REGISTER yourdesiredpassword youremail@someplace.com

Please change the above example to your actual password and email address

If you DID previously REGISTER your nick, and you are asked to IDENTIFY, then type

/msg NickServ IDENTIFY yourpasswordhere

REGISTER and IDENTIY are only really crucial if someone is to be promoted to permanent OP/MOD of the channel

If you just want to chat, then enter the channel and type /nick Ennis--~~ or some combo of special signs to make your nick unique

IT is possible to pre register a NICK for someone else, promote them to OP/MOD,give it to them with the password you have chosen,... using your OWN email address so you can access the activation code/command. Then once you give them their nick and password, they can change the password to something else and change the email address to their own email address

Yahoo, MSN, and AOL AIM, and ICQ all offer group chat with invite.

IRC is another possibility. mIRC is one chat client.

I think mIRC costs money. I used to use XIRCON for IRC, which was free. I am not certain if it is still freeware

http://www.xircon.com/index.html

Why not take a survey of which members have which chat clients (yahoo, aim, msn, icq), and how many would be interested in live chat....

Live chat can be an informal thing, with as few as 3 people, who use the same chat client.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_room

I just now installed the latest version of XIRCON and found a walkthrough for connection HERE

http://gc.stonewallcs.com/IRC/clients/XiRCON/

I followed the exact instructions at the above walkthroug, to tell XIRCON to connect to SlashNET at irc.slashnet.org

My final step was to type /join #brokeback

which had the effect of instantly creating a room named #brokeback, with me as moderator. Rooms may be created on the fly in such a fashion. Also, rooms may be made permanent. There is documentation, locatable by search engines for all such fine tuning. But, bottom line, not having looked at IRC in 3 years, I installed XIRCON, connected to an IRC channel called Slashnet (there are hundreds), and created a room called #brokeback. So anyone else who follows these steps would find themselves in my room, and able to chat.

As far as I can see, having installed the latest XIRCON client, it is still totally freeware.

Here is a link which gives a farely exhaustive list of various IRC chat clients available, followed by a list of IRC commands.

But the bare minimum steps I took (above) to install configure and connect took me only 10 minutes or less. Now all I need is someone to do the same and chat with me.

Here is documention on how to permanently reserve your nick (in my case Sitaram) in the IRC SlashNET server

http://gc.stonewallcs.com/IRC/guide.php#advanced.nickreg

If you decidite to try out XIRCON and IRC chat then this link will help you learn a little about XIRCON scripts

http://ftp.ksut.edu.tw/FTP/Unix/IRC/clients/tcl-tk/xircon/xircfaq.html

If you do reserve a nick for yourself (e.g. I reserved Sitaram) then, whenever you connect to the IRC server, you need to

/msg NickServ IDENTIFY (password) to tell the server that you are entitled to use that nick

You may want to add that IDENTIFY command to your default.tcl script, which is what I am trying to accomplish now.

Here is how to register a channel name, such as #brokeback, to your nick, making you the founder:

http://www.vtc.net/~thawman/commandchanserv.html

by issuing the command

/msg chanserv register #brokeback yourpassword brokeback channel

To recap my steps above:

http://www.xircon.com/download.htm

ftp://ftp.xircon.com/pub/xircon/XiRC10B4.EXE

After quick download, install XIRCON by running the downloaded install file.

Next, Launch XIRCON

Click on Server
Click on Connect

follow the instructions here
http://gc.stonewallcs.com/IRC/clients/XiRCON/

You will need to pick a nick and an alternate nick, (shown in tutorial).

Once you successfully connect to the SlashNET server
type /join #brokeback and you will find youself in the #brokeback channel with Sitaram. I will probably leave my machine up tonight, while I sleep, in case someone wants to tried this out, and leave me a message.

IRC (using XIRCON client) takes a little more work, to learn a few commands, than Yahoo or MSN or ICQ or AOL AIM, but it is totally free, extremely fast, with low overhead, AND you can tell XIRCON to LOG all chat, and then you can edit interesting discussions and post them at the message board, as SEMINARS, and thereby ADD to the message board, rather than detract.

And, you open up your board to the IRC world, which is rather large, I suppose.

Plus, it is kind of fun to learn something like IRC.

As a final step, I created a folder on my C drive entitled IRC Chat Logs, and in my XIRCON preferences under LOGGING, I turned on automatic channel logging, so anything posted in #brokeback will be logged. I would be happy to edit serious chats, extract the topics, and post them in a special forum for Live Chat dialogues. I would omit the silly and frivilous comments, and post topics and insights of substance and meaning, pending approval of admin and mods.

I needed a final piece of information from this link to get logging to start:
http://helios.acomp.usf.edu/~pedersen/IRC.html

Get your own free IRC Chat room