Channels Navigation and Chatting

The whole point of Internet Relay Chat is just that, to CHAT. Whether that be sports, sex, beer, knitting, television, music, or whatever. IRC seems to be a place you can possibly find someone who shares your interests, no matter how diverse those interests might be. With thousands of people on, the chances of finding an interesting conversation can usually be pretty good.

Now, figuring out how to get started once you're on a server can be a bit confusing. First off, you generally need to find a channel to go to. This can be a bit of a task, since a lot of times there are nearly as many channels as there are people on IRC, sometimes thousands of channels. How can you pick one that suits your interests?
Well, for starters, there are some channels that are supposed to be fairly good for newbies (people new to IRC). Channels you might like to try include:

#beginners  on Lagnet
#beginners on Zanet.

Joining a Channel

Simply type /join [whatever channel] and you're on it.
For example:
/join #insanity
puts you on #insanity.
I try to do my part to talk to people who want to talk to me, but there are people around who don't like new people. In that way, some channels can be cliquish. Once you've gotten the hang of chatting, then you can look for channels that suit your own interests. You can always use the /list command to see all the channels, however, typing that without any modifiers, will almost always flood you right off of IRC. The best thing to do is to limit it with either -min or -max. -min means a minimum number of people. While -max of course is a maximum number of people. So, if you type:
/list -min 5
you get a listing of all channels (that aren't secret or private) with 5 or more people on them. If you type:
/list -max 5
you get a list of all channels (that aren't secret or private) with less then 5 people on it.

Now, we'll say you've joined a channel, there are two things to cover:


"The Ways of the Channel

"Talking on the Channel and to OtherPeople


Once you've gotten the hang of that, you're free to surf irc and have as many interesting (or boring) conversations as you want. And once you do that, then you can really start playing around with some of the neat toys such as bots and scripts. Also you're free to play more in the ways of customizing stuff for yourself.

Section 4