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Tutorial: Setting up your IRC client

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  • Tutorial: Setting up your IRC client

    This guide is being put together for those of you who are unsure of how to set up your IRC client, I'll be doing a version for Hexchat and Mirc the two clients I tend to rotate between depending on how I feel at the time. Both have their own pros and cons, and personally I have a slight preference for mirc despite it not being quite as visually clean cut as hexchat as it allows you to do quite a lot with it like set up your own irc bot for your twitch channel amongst other things if you know how. However Hexchat for someone who just wants to use it to chat is probably the better choice and a fair bit more user friendly.

    So without further ado let's start with hexchat.

    Once you've installed hexchat which can be found here, you should encounter a screen that looks something like this, mine has a few servers you won't find on there by default including our own lzh server, but that's the point of this guide getting you to the point you can add and connect to the server of your choice.



    Click on the Add button to add a server to the list and type in "LzH" "MyLzH" or which ever variation of our team name you prefer and hit enter/return, once this is done we'll want to start telling the client where to connect, so with the LzH irc server selected, click on the edit button which will take you to the following screen.



    This may seem a little confusing at first but I'll take you through the options that are important for now, at the top at three "tabs" Servers (which is where the irc server connects to much like a web url for a website), Autojoin Channels (which let's you join a channel automatically when you connect to a server) and finally Connect Commands (Which as the name suggests lets you automatically use a command as you connect to the server e.g. /msg Carnage64 did you quit FF7, will send a message to carnage64 every time you connect asking him that question).

    Following that is "Connect to selected server only" which you won't want to use but it forces you to only use a specific address for the server you're connecting to, Connect to this server automatically that does exactly what it says on the box, Bypass proxy server we won't touch, same for use SSL for all the servers on this network, Accept invalid ssl certificates as well we won't be touching and use global user information will be ticked when you start and normally you'd probably leave it so unless you want the irc to automatically log you into a name you've registered on the server, something we will touch on after the mirc guide as it's something that's shared between the two clients. However as a note and as you'll see on the next image, if you use a specific name and info for this server and want an auto login the Login Method required is "Nickserv (/msg nickserv + password)".

    Our server address as you can see in the image is "irc.mylzh.net" without the quotation marks, as an aditional note if you're using a server that's not connected to via port 6667 you may need to input the server as "irc.serveraddress.net/1234" with 1234 referring to the port used.



    The is the final page well be touching on for this quick tutorial, which is showing the autojoin channels tab, by default on the lzh server you'll be thrown into the #mylzh channel, however if you say want to join #trivia on connect every time this is where you'd do it, however the Key/Password box for most channels should be left blank unless one is actually required to join the channel in which case you'd put the relevant one in.

    In the next post mirc, and some common commands between the two clients.
    Last edited by LionOrphenoc; 07-28-2015, 09:19 AM.

  • #2
    Now we're starting with mirc, I'll be keeping this pretty much to the basics for this post, there is a lot more you can with with mirc however that would be grounds for another tutorial and may be covered in another post detailing some extras the two clients can do.

    When you install mirc (which can be found HERE), you should see a screen that looks like this.



    So with this mIRC options window in front of you, the first thing we'll do is input your nickname and a potential alternative in case it's already in use, in my case I used Lion_Orphenoc and Lion, for you it may well be "Random_reader_x", in both hexchat and mirc you can't use spaces in your nickname along with certain characters. The spaces for your name and email aren't needed but you are free to fill them in if you desire.

    Once you've done this click on Servers on the tree on the left of the window which will bright you to the following window.



    Click the Add Button here and another window will pop up that you will need to fill the server details in on.



    Though you see the lzh details filled in on mine, which also saves me typing them out again, once you're done click on the Add Button and we're done here for a moment. This will close the window you just filled in and take you back to the previous server list you were just on which will have an addition of the server whose details you just input. Click on the server group you just added and then on the server that expands below it. Using the connect button now if everything has been done correctly will connect you to the LZH irc server, and automatically place you in the #mylzh channel. If you want to automatically login to your registered name on the irc server click on the "Options" that sits below the word connect on the tree down the left side of the window.



    This will take you back to the options tab, here you will want to click the Perform button which will bring up another window.



    This screen lets you set commands that will connect as you get onto a selected server, as we're working with the LzH server at the moment, click the Add Button, find the LzH server you added and finally double click on it and it will be selected. The command you see in the text box in the above image is the one to log into the nickserv on our server, however say you wanted to always connect to #trivia you could add "/join #trivia" and it would do so, a little less user friendly than the autojoin channels on hexchat but just as effective and allows a little more tweaking as you learn other commands.

    That just about covers mirc for now, in the final post I'll cover some basic commands including registering you nickname on our irc server, how to do "actions" and a couple of others that may or may not be interesting.




    Last edited by LionOrphenoc; 07-28-2015, 03:34 AM.

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    • #3
      Now we're going to cover a few universal commands between the two clients, this is going to be a fairly short post but for those new to irc I can see this being a somewhat useful reference post.
      • /join #Channel - This allows you to join the channel named after the # which is required in irc to specify a chatroom
      • /msg username - Your basic whisper function, in both mirc and hexchat this will open up a separate chat window in which you can chat privately with your target
      • /msg nickserv REGISTER password email - This registers your nickname to the server, allowing you to kick off anyone else using your name and/or clear your username if you disconnected unexpectedly and it looks like you're still in chat.
      • /msg nickserv IDENTIFY password - This logs you in as long as you use it with your registered nickname
      • /server -m serveraddress - this lets you connect to another server without closing your current server, useful if you want to be on multiple servers, you can do this without the -m as well however it will close the current server you're on and connect to the new one.
      Hexchat also has a unique command of it's own but you should only really use it in chats you know that won't consider it spam, and that's /winamp which shows people in chat what you have playing in winamp. This command can be added to mirc via a script but that's not really something for a basic tutorial, if you feel there are other commands that should be added to this post please feel free to throw me a message on the forums or on irc (I'm Lion_Orphenoc on there) and I'll see about adding it.

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      • #4
        Thanks for sharing this, I know a lot of people have been having issues setting a client up and been using our web client. Hopefully this helps them!

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