IRC

You've probably been sent here for making a booboo on Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

IRC:1 Search first, ask last.

IRC:2 U.S. Politics

IRC:3 Asking to ask

IRC:4 Wrong channel

IRC:5 LART

IRC:6 Search that question/term

IRC:7 Don't private message a stranger

IRC:8 Long URL

IRC:9 Clarify your question

IRC:10 Cut to the chase

IRC:11 Literacy

Rtfm

Internet:Help Process

Irc::Wishlist

IRC
Many of the editors of this [Wiki] hang out, or at least lurk, in the #unixhelp and #geekhelp IRC channels on EFNet. Anyone is welcome to join the channel and ask questions (but please have a look at the several items in the list above first!).

If you have not used IRC before, you will need to obtain a client (see the list below), and connect to an IRC server. Using  should connect you to one of several available servers.

Clients
For UBOs: xchat is the most popular GUI client.

Some ncurses based clients are: irssi, epic, and BitchX

For Windows: Mirc is by far the most popular.

Commands
There are many IRC servers and networks of servers. In this example, we'll connect to a network of servers called EFnet. So if you do

/server irc.efnet.org

in your IRC client, it will connect you to one of the EFNet servers. Once you're connected, you'll see the MOTD (Message of the day) scroll by. You're now connected to a server. Now you join whatever channel you want.

/join #irchelp

will put you in a popular IRC help channel. You can be on many channels at once, so you might also want to:

/join #help

for more generalized help. If you want to see what channels are on a given server:

/list

and to find more information about a person (Their DNS, what server they are on, if they are /away)

/whois NickName

and when you've had enough

/quit Time for bed

will log you off the server with the message "Time for bed" which will show up in all the channels you were on.