IRC

Nickname completion is seemingly universally supported and means you don't have to type the full nickname of another user when you address her. This is particularly useful when you encounter channels that contain users with strange nicknames. ...

This can get tedious, so many clients have some kind of automatic completion facility that works out whose nick you're trying to type and finishes the job for you. This hack will explain the nick-completion functionality provided in several p...

It also allows them to scroll up to see what conversations they have missed in all of their channels. When you listen to a message on your voice mail, you are typically told when it was sent so you know how fresh the message is. If you've ...

IRC can be a fun way to kill some time, although it's all too easy to get carried away and find it taking up more time than you'd like. After using IRC for a while, you tend to join more channels that interest you and get to know more people ...

mIRC is one of the most popular IRC clients available for Windows, and it comes complete with a robust scripting engine. Thousands of ready-to-run scripts are available from sites like http://www.mircscripts.org, although it is often hard t...

Even though most IRC clients support color, simpler formatting can sometimes be more effective. Too much use of color tends to annoy people. In such circumstance, channel operators have at their disposal the option of banning the use of color...

Color can be useful. With it, one can add extra emphasis to typed words, and make them look prettier and more eye-catching. Color can also be annoying. It is important to steer clear of color combinations that are unnecessary or hard to read....

One of mIRC's most underused features is the ability to play sounds and to send and receive sound requests. This allows multiple users or whole channels to listen to the same sound at the same time, which is excellent for getting people's a...

irssi is a client with a very nice Perl scripting interface. You don't have to be a Perl programmer to enjoy this fact, as many scripts are already available. In fact, it's hard to find original ideas for new scripts, because everything see...

Most IRC clients these days have the ability to handle connections to multiple servers at the same time. This hack explains how to do it in some of the more popular clients. 4.10.1 mIRC To connect to an additional server in mIRC, b...

Messages, commands, passwords, everything gets sent to the server unencrypted, which frankly just makes life easy for eavesdroppers. The Internet has demanded a solution to this problem, and the Internet has provided one: SSL, the Swiss Army ...

Many firewalls block IRC but allow SSH connections. This hack explains how to take advantage of this fact to tunnel your IRC connection via SSH and bypass the firewall. Unsurprisingly, you will need an SSH client to use SSH. If you run L...

Let's say you're the one in charge of managing a huge channel that is dedicated to some important event that's going on. Hundreds of people are joining and leaving and, like any large channel, it will inevitably attract some abusers as well...

The possibilities are endless—if only your IRC client could speak! It is not impossible, but because this is still very much a cutting edge and not a mass technology, it will not be easy to set up either. You will be hacking in Perl, this ...

Webcams are the best way to let people know exactly what you're doing—after all, a picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. Adding extra text to your webcam image can reveal a lot more, particularly if you are not there to be seen. ...