...is brought to you by...
IRC is quite different from other forms of chat you might
have used, and using IRC with WebTV is somewhat different from using IRC on a
computer.
For WebTV users who've never used IRC before, the speed and structure are
kind of hard to figure out–for one thing, it's really fast.
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and IRC is a sort of network on the Internet,
like the Web itself, but it's separate, and works differently.
The reason for the speed is every time anyone in the chatroom hits Return
after typing a message, it goes onscreen nearly instantly. There are chatrooms
on IRC with more than 200 people in them at times, and the speed can get pretty
much out of control, especially if you're not used to it. You can temporarily
halt the upward scrolling of the text by using the Up Arrow or the Scroll Up
key, but eventually the top of the page will appear, and the text you're reading
will disappear off the top of the page. If you're a beginner, starting out in
a room with fewer people is a good idea, until you get the basic operation figured
out.
For the moment, the nickname you have in IRC chat is part of your WebTV user
e-mail address, and the only way you can change your nick is to create a new
user account on the terminal (go to the homepage of the primary user, click
Setup, click WebTV Users, and select Add a User at the bottom of the screen.
We may be able to change our nicks at will later, but for now this is the only
way.
The section immediately below tells you about the IRC commands you have available
to you with WebTV. It is most specifically oriented toward chatting at Talk
City, but the commands work the same on any server. After this section you will
find information on chatting on servers other than Talk City; I do recommend
Talk City for IRC newbies, as people there tend to be more tolerant of people
asking basic questions about IRC chat.
On the sidebar in a chatroom at TalkCity, you will see four
links: TalkCity, Rooms, New, and Whisper.
Clicking TalkCity brings you to the WebTV main page at TalkCity, which
allows you to read the rules, gives you some how-to information for using IRC
with TalkCity, and shows you some of the featured rooms of the moment, along
with a list of the rooms that are always open.
Clicking Rooms gives you a list of all the rooms (the public ones)
that are currently in use at TalkCity, and the number of people in each, in
order of most-crowded to least-crowded. Most if not all of these rooms include
a topic to guide you in making a choice.
Clicking New allows you to create your own room and set a topic for
it, and you also have the option of setting the room up as private and unlisted,
so that it won't appear on the Rooms list.
Clicking Whisper allows you to send a private message (a pm) to another
person in the chatroom you are currently in. You will see a checklist of all
the people in the room in the window on the left, check the name you want to
send a message to. Then type in the message on the right, and hit Return. Private
messages sent this way are only visible to the person sending and the person
receiving them. It's considered good chat etiquette to ask a person in a public
message if they want to talk to you privately before pming them.
Here are some things you can do using IRC commands (note
that the commands available at the moment using IRC with WebTV are fewer than
those usable with a PC; these are the only ones that work right now, just type
them in the text box where you write your regular chat messages):
/who makes a list of people in the room appear on
the screen, and it looks like this:
People in this room: adam12, BigBear, catdancing, dogbark, Emily, KeyOfCCC,
TalkCity4, wolfschild
Again, some of these people are possibly gone, and just exist in your WebTV
terminal's memory; double-check with Whisper (and look for the name on
the checklist) to be absolutely sure they're still there.
/me makes an action or emotion statement about you (use third-person
to make it read better). If you type /me jumps in the air, it looks like
this onscreen (automatically inserting your nick):
nickname jumps in the air
/msg allows you to send a private message to another person chatting.
It works the same as whisper, but works to any room on the TalkCity server.
Both /msg and Whisper messages that you write appear to you like this:
yournick (to theirnick): What's up?
A /msg or Whisper to you from someone else looks like this:
theirnick (to you): What's up?
As mentioned above, it's a good idea to ask a chatter in
a public message if they want to talk privately with you.
/whois lets you get some information on another chatter, but the information
available is somewhat limited. If the chatter is on WebTV, you will only see
their handle repeated, like this:
ericpaul is ericpaul
While that doesn't seem like much information, if ericpaul wasn't on the TalkCity
server anywhere, you would see this:
ericpaul is not known
So you can actually check to see if someone you know is around by using /whois.
You can use wildcards with /whois, which would allow you to find someone even
if they get a number stuck on the end of their nick (which the system does sometimes
when there's a nick conflict, that is, when more than one person is using the
same nick, or the system thinks there's more than one). For example,
if ericpaul is currently ericpaul1, Typing /whois ericpaul wouldn't work.
Typing /whois ericpaul* would find ericpaul1, however.
You can also use /whois to find who the CCCs are (City Conference Crewmembers,
working for TalkCity) at any given moment, by typing /whois *CCC*. /ignore nickname will give you the onscreen message:
You are now ignoring nickname
/ignore -nickname gives you:
You are no longer ignoring nickname
/ignore will show a list of everyone you're currently ignoring:
You are ignoring nickname1, nickname2, nickname3
/topic allows you to set the topic in a room you yourself have created,
and the topic appears in the Rooms list, and at the top of the screen when someone
enters your room. It appears in gold, like this:
If you changed the topic in the room by typing /topic
Join Us for Coffee and Doughnuts!, you would see this:
yournickname has changed the topic to:
Only the creator of a room can change the topic of the room.
An Important Clarification: /topic is an ops command, meaning
that it is a command giving power over the way the room is operated. At this
time, it is the only ops command that works with WebTV. /kick,
/op, /deop, /mode, and other ops commands do not work
with WebTV. This places us in an odd situation. When we create a room, we have
ops, we control it technically, but we can barely do anything with it. Computer
users entering the room can see who has ops, but with only the power
to change the topic of the room, it isn't much power at all.
WebTV has indicated that more commands may be added in the future, but no
time or specific commands to be added have been mentioned yet.
From the sidebar at Talk City, you have the option to create
a new room, by clicking New. You'll be given a popup screen to enter the
room name and topic, and to make the room private and unlisted,
check the box below that. Then you can give out the name of the room to friends
you want to chat with, unbothered by random interlopers.
Private rooms should be unavailable to people who don't know the room
name, but you should know that the room you create is temporary. If you go to
the room later, either by clicking New again, clicking Join and entering
the room name, or you type /join into the message box, if the room had been
empty when you clicked New (and you didn't check the Private option) or Join,
or used the /join command, the room will be recreated as a listed room.
If you had saved the room to Favorites when it was private (you can check
to see if a room is private by hitting Info), clicking on that Fav will recreate
the room as a private unlisted room.
You can mail a private room to another WebTVer with Send, and if the Info
button showed the room private when you sent it, the receiver can click the
Included page: link in the message (then or later), and the room will
be private and unlisted.
Any time you are in a public room, and you use /who
and see a name listed with CCC in the nick, that indicates a City Conference Crewmember
is hosting (or moderating) that room, and they will help you with any questions
you have (and keep the room friendly, too). If you see a TalkCity listed, with
or without a number after "TalkCity", that indicates that there is a robot program
in that room, and its function is to keep the language clean; use the wrong vocabulary
(you can probably guess most of the words), and you won't be able to continue
chatting in that room. Remember, the 'bots don't understand context, and you'll
get in trouble even if it's only a typo.
There aren't any CCCs in private rooms, or 'bots for that matter; but you
are technically under the rules anyway, and if somebody complains about goings-on
in your private room, you will still get in trouble. If you need to check the
rules at TalkCity, click TalkCity on the sidebar if you're in a chatroom there,
and click Rules on the sidebar. If you find yourself having a problem with someone
in a chatroom, send a private message to the CSA (City Standards Advisor, the
real "enforcers" of the rules), using /msg csa "Message explaining the problem".
If you're ready to chat at Talk City, click here.
There's a persistent bug at Talk City when you enter it through the "front
door" (by which I mean, from the Home page, clicking Community, clicking Chat,
and clicking the Talk City logo on the right). There's another way in, one that
eliminates the problem of the Whisper freeze:
If you want to use an IRC network other than Talk City, you will need to choose
a network or channel you're interested in. If you already know a network you
want to try, but you don't have a server name, or you just want to browse different
networks, click here and look up several server names on that network, write
them down, and hit Back until you return to this page, then read Connecting
to Other IRC servers, below.
If you have a subject you're interested in, and you want to look up chat rooms
(channels) that relate to this subject, click here to go the the Liszt
Chat search engine. Search for the keyword ("horse", "cat", "philadelphia",
or whatever else you're interested in), look through the list of rooms, click
on the room name. The Liszt site will attempt to connect you to the server,
but that won't work; scroll down that page, and write down the server and channel
name displayed at the bottom. Then read hit Back as many times as necessary
to return to this page, and read the next section.
Once you have at least the name of the chat server you want to connect to,
go to your WebTV Home page, click Community, click Chat, then click Goto on
the sidebar to the left. Now enter the server name in the top blank box, and
the channel name (if you have one) in the third box; then hit the button at
the bottom.
If you have trouble connecting, and you have written down several server names,
try another server on that network. Try several, because connecting is iffy
at times; if you can't connect at all, try again later.
If you connect to an IRC network server without entering a channel name, you'll
get a list of a bunch of channels, but not all of them. To see a list
of the 100 most popular channels on a given IRC network, click here, find the name of the
network in the list running down the left of the page, click the name, look
for the link to the list of the 100 most popular channels, click that,
and go channel shopping. Then follow the instructions above in this section
for connecting to that server and channel.
When a computer user wants to meet up with you to chat at Talk City, they
need to go to http://www.talkcity.com/chat
and download a copy of EZTalk Pro, a Java-based program
that lets them chat there (EZTalk Lite is available, too, but very limited, Pro
is much preferred). Note: the page at Talk City looks entirely different
to a computer user than it does on WebTV; they'll get the download option, we
can't see it there at all.
Or they can download Pirch or mIRC (if they have an IBM-compatible computer), or Ircle (if they have a Mac) from the
Internet, for free. These are IRC client programs, and they'll be able to meet
you by setting the IRC server to chat.talkcity.com, the port to 7000,
and entering the name of the chatroom you want to meet them in (make
sure you agree on exactly the same spelling of the room, otherwise you'll "miss"
each other).
AOL users can get very good information about using IRC
in general from here (information on getting the mIRC IRC program installed,
and how to use it, for people on AOL with no IRC experience). You should
tell your AOL friends that, after they follow this page's instructions, they
should connect to the chat.talkcity.com server, port 7000, and
whatever #channel (room) you want to meet them in at Talk City.
Ready to chat? Click here.
Have fun, be good,
Join Us for Coffee and Doughnuts!
...is brought to you by...