IRC help

At Shodor, an alternative to email is Internet Relay Chat, commonly known as IRC. IRC allows for a quicker way of connecting with someone. At Shodor, we also use it in our workshops to allow students chat with scientists about their work. A wide variety of clients are available for use on Mac and Windows. UNIX users will most likely have an irc client on their machine. To test it, simply type "irc" at a command line prompt. If you do not have irc on your unix machine, contact your system adminstrator.

For Mac and Windows users, try looking at Tucows or Download.com for different clients that are available. Common ones are listed below

Mac OS - IRCLE
Windows - mIRC on download.cnet.com
XChat for Win32
Unix - XChat, or the client bundled with your distribution
Chatzilla is also available with the Mozilla.org browser for Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix.

Please note that IRCLE and mIRC are shareware and are available for a 30-day trial period; paid registration is required after the trial period. XChat is freely distributable and does not have a trial period, but it is in an unstable state for Windows versions. Chatzilla is available for free across multiple operating systems. mIRC is a popular client on Windows, but we experienced some difficulties with getting it to work on some machines. As a result, we list XChat as an alternative Windows client here.

Whichever client you use, when you start it you will want to connect to a server. In general, IRC has a number of servers out there with a large amount of content of varying degrees of usefulness. To keep things simple we run an internal server at Shodor with one active channel.

Connect to the server scan.shodor.org, using the default port (if you are required to specify one, use 6667, the default value). Join the channel #succeed.

Brief instructions are also available for the following applications:
mIRC
XChat
IRCLE

Additional help on IRC can also be found on IRCHelp.org.

Please direct any questions you may have towards djoiner@shodor.org.