IRC

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Revision as of 14:26, 31 October 2007 by Marki (Talk | contribs) (irc instructions)

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We have an IRC chat room for discussion of GlueX and GlueX-related topics. I am imagining that it will be mostly used for software discussions, but for now there is no reason to limit the scope. It is an informal communication channel for quick questions that need answers in quasi-real time, mini-announcements, and general project-related banter. Messages here are separated from folks' email stream by construction.

In a chat room, you see everything that anyone sends in real time. Everyone sees everything that you send. It is all plain text; nothing fancy (to lowest order).

To get into the room, you need an IRC client: a program that running on your computer that can send and receive the messages. IRC is a very old technology; there are countless IRC clients out there. All major Linux distributions come with three or four. Here is partial list (google "irc client" for more).

linux clients: gaim, pidgin, epic mac client: ircle windows client: mIRC

Once your client is running you need two pieces of information, the server IP name and the channel name (i. e., name of the chat room at that server):

server: irc.freenode.net
channel: #gluex

In the following, the syntax from client to client may vary, but typically, once connected to the server the command to enter the room is

  /join #gluex

and there is often a

  /help

command available.

There is a transcript kept of the conversation. This is especially useful if you come into the room in the middle of a discussion; your client cannot display what has been said before you got there. The logs are kept at

 http://halldweb1.jlab.org/logbot/

To find out more about IRC, here is one place to start.

The service we are using from freenode.net is free.