Posted on 09/09/2003 9:28:31 PM PDT by SpaceBar
The Brass Knuckles Webzine Guide to IRC By Archfiend
Most of the people reading this page have of course heard of Internet Relay Chat (IRC). However some of you have been living "normal" lives and wasting your time out dating "girls" and working "jobs" and don't know what IRC is. Much like Serbia, IRC is a place where people who've given up hope, congregate and talk amongst themselves. Except on IRC some sort of chat client is used so you don't have to look at the potato sacks and donated polyester clothing everyone else is wearing like in Serbia.
Now obviously every person reading this article will want to know all the ins and outs of IRC so they can frown and act superior to their non-literate internet friends who have no farging clue what IRC is.
So let me introduce you to the world of IRC. Think of IRC as a fascinating collection of chat channels where guests are encouraged to join the various rooms and not talk to each other or alternately try to talk every guest in the room with a female nick into having cybersex with them.
Picking a channel to enter on IRC is very difficult because there is a description associated with each room. You would think that would make it easier to find a room on IRC but the descriptions are typically so incredibly confusing so no one could ever really guess what the purpose of the channel is all about.
For example, a Christian channel on IRC should have a description that talks about the mating habits of apes, a warez channel should have a description dealing with the size of Brittany Spears breasts, and of course a channel dedicated to discussing Nsync should have a description that discusses how fast the polar ice caps are melting. In short, every room you go into requires a complete guess about what's going in the channels (except for the large number of pedophille channels who do a great job of describing what's going on in their rooms).
As long as you keep in mind that 95% of all channels you can go into on IRC are either warez rooms where they trade virus laden software , porn rooms that mainly deal in pictures of 8 year olds and nude elephants, hacker rooms where everyone will use you for practice, anime rooms where everyone speaks a different language than you, role playing rooms that you can never hope to understand, or channels full of personal friends where you aren't welcome, you'll be just fine!
So you may be wondering, Archfiend so how do we pick a channel to go into? Just remember that you can really break all IRC channels down into two different groups. Large channels, and small ones.
In the small rooms expect to hear a sentence from one of the other people in the room about every 10 minutes or so. Although there may appear to be as many as 10-15 people in the room usually about 5 or 6 are useless "bots" people are experimenting with, and the rest are people who only log onto IRC while they do laundry, go out to eat, or watch Monday Night Football. As soon as they finish with these activities they usually go back to their computers and log off of IRC.
In the large channels there are so many people going in and out of the channel, people holding private conversations in the middle on the room, people asking for cybersex, and people with ops kicking other people out that conversation is basically impossible.
In either type of room, any new person who attempts to speak is usually "slapped with a large trout" repeatedly. This is a common way of annoying people who try to start up a conversation. If a person persists in talking it is tradition for anyone who's actually in the channel to say "shut up newbie" repeatedly and kick the person out of the channel if they have ops (control of the channel).
If two people do somehow manage to get a conversation going on IRC, a notice is sent out. IRC has a large staff of "Netcops" that will begin to cause what are known are server splits in order to stop the conversation. Basically it will appear that each of you has left the server when you are really there. If you somehow manage to make make it past IRC's line of defense #1, they will simply send in a group of hackers who will take over your channel, change the name of it to "I own j00" and kick everyone out of the channel in order to stop all meaningful conversation.
Remember, the whole point of IRC is to bring thousands of people together in the same place not to talk. As long as you just accept that wherever u go on IRC everyone hates u, never ever, say hello or be friendly to anyone, and never expect to meet any other people on IRC, you should do just fine!
Ah, for the day's when undernet still rocked.
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