Throughout the history of the internet, chat rooms and forums have grown exponentially. Many people in these chat rooms were annoyed at the use of explicit language, so administrators implemented censoring of inappropriate words.Censoring, as originally implemented, resulted in a lack of emotion from a user’s censored statement while allowing the conveyance of meaning. Circumcensoring does just the opposite, it allows the expression of emotion without allowing much meaning to be conveyed. Due to the obvious uniqueness of circumcensoring and the virtues that must be obvious to the reader, I am planning on implementing circumcensoring in an unrealircd plugin, aptly named CircumCensor. Although this plugin is bound to remain undeveloped for a while, it may eventually be developed whenever I have free time.

By default, when you exit most IRC clients (including pidgin), the quit message will look something like “normaldotcom has quit (Quit: normaldotcom).” The preferred way to exit out of a channel or an IRC session is using the /quit IRC command. It’s pretty simple, just type “/quit leaving to do something in real life with real people.” This will notify others of your departure, and your reasoning for doing so. It’s just a lot nicer and a lot less annoying. Practice proper IRC etiquette and use /quit !

Start out by telnetting to your server, in this example, ProtoFusion’s IRC server on the default port for IRC

telnet irc.protofusion.org 6667

Now you should see something like this:

:irc.protofusion.org NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname…
:irc.protofusion.org NOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname (cached)

If not, ensure that your port and server settings are correct. Now that you’re connected, you need to set your nickname and your user info. This is done with a simple series of commands:

USER your name * * :Your Description
NICK yournickname

Now you should see some log-on output, and you should autojoin #protofusion if you’re on protofusion.org. If not, you cna join channels with the JOIN [channel] command. Of course you will probably want to talk in the channel, which is a bit tedious uneless you put the first part in your clipboard.

PRIVMSG #protofusion Write your message text here

The privmsg command can also be used with a username instaed of a channel to PM an individual IRC user. Other stuff you may want to know:

• The server usually pings users every once and a while, and you need to “pong” back to the server so your session doesn’t time out and disconnect. If the server sends you a “PING :protofusion.org” or the like, you must respond “PONG :protofusion.org” in a somewhat timely fashion, depending on the server’s configuration.
• Your connection can also time out if you d on’t set your USER and NICK data in a timely fashion