#irc protocol

Quick run through on how to chat on IRC without installing third party software on Windows. This works on Windows 7 and virtually every other earlier version of Windows(might not work in the home editions).

Go to Control Panel, (set the view to small icons) click 'Programs and Features'. In the sidebar you will find 'Turn Windows features on or off', clicking on it will open up a new windows. In the new window scroll down and search for 'telnet client', make sure the checkbox is checked and press OK. Restart if required, although I don't think it's required for telnet, certain programs on that list will only work after restarting your PC.

Now that you have Telnet, let's get into the action. Open up your command prompt. <Command/Windows key> + R (this will ask you what you want to run), type 'cmd' then <ENTER>. Okay and we are now in the command prompt. If this is your first time in 'cmd' and you liked the movie the matrix type 'color 0a' for bonus points(I prefer 'color F1').

Ready? Lets connect to an irc server. In this case the freenode.org irc server.

telnet irc.freenode.org 6667

The '6667' is the portnumber on which irc runs by default. Now that we are connected it is time to choose a nickname and identify ourselves as a user.

NICK robbe USER robbe * * : rvdg

robbe is going to be our nickname on irc and rvdg are my initials but that's where you are supposed to fill in your full name. By now you should be seeing a large deal of text scroll over the screen with the message of the day and the rules of the server you are connected to. Now lets have some fun and join a channel.

JOIN #testung

You should now have joined the channel en received the NAMES list from that channel. (to see who else is in the channel you could type NAMES #testung) To send a message to another person or to the channel you use the PRIVMSG command.

PRIVMSG #testung :The starts from the first colon until you press enter. PRIVMSG other_user :What about a nice game of chess?

Also very important to know is how to reply to the PONG of the server to show that you are not inactive. Everytime you are inactive for a certain period of time the server will send you something like this PING :hitchcock.freenode.net and you will have to reply with the proper PONG. In this case

PONG :hitchcock.freenode.net

If you do not do this in time you will get a Pingtimeout and you will be disconnected from the server. You can join multiple chatrooms at once, although this is not really advised when chatting over telnet. If you would like to leave a room you could use the PART command. Exiting is done with the QUIT command. Both commands accept a reason parameter but this is optional. You can leave out the colon and everything after it. This message will be visible for the other people that are in the room.

PART #testung :You guys are boring QUIT :Sorry I can't stay online, gf is here

So I hope you learned something here. If you'd like to use a decent IRC client you could use:

Quassel

Chatzilla

Ow and one more thing. You can request all the channels that are running on that IRC server with the LIST commando. HOWEVER, this list could contain hundreds to possibly a thousand channels and are listed with their full description if you issue the LIST command. So this is only useful on small IRC servers, big mastodons like freenode.org will ony give you a Matrix impression(which is cool, right?).