What is Internet Relay Chat (IRC)?
Q: What is Internet Relay Chat (IRC)?
A: IRC is a chat system on the Internet that allows people from around the world to have conversations together. It can also be used for two people to chat privately.
Q: How are IRC channels organized?
A: The IRC chat rooms, or channels, are hosted on servers which you can connect to by finding that server's information. This information will often begin with "irc," then a period, the name of the server, then another period, and finally .com .org or .net.
Q: Are there different sizes of IRC servers?
A: Yes, there are small IRC servers (for example, OperaNet) to medium IRC servers (freenode and DalNet, which have about 30,000 users) and big IRC servers (for example, EFNet and UnderNet which have over 100,000 users).
Q: What do users need in order to use an IRC channel?
A: Users of an IRC channel need an IRC client - a computer program that works with the channel - in order to use it. There are many clients available; some run in web browsers while others run as applications. Popular stand-alone clients include mIRC for Microsoft Windows and XChat for Linux and Microsoft Windows. The Opera web browser has an integrated client while ChatZilla is a plugin for Mozilla Firefox.
Q: What is an IRC bot?
A: An IRC bot is a computer program that helps control and protect channels.
Q: How do you identify an IRC channel?
A: The name of an IRC channel usually begins with a hash (#).
