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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

For a while, we tried #news.yc on freenode. Now there are a few of us on #startups.

Any pointers to a useful irc tutorial? I am trying to connect with pidgin, and have a message like this: freenode-connect: Received CTCP 'VERSION' from freenode-connect

But that doesn't seem to put me in some kind of IRC mode, because none of the commands from the tutorial at http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html work.

I feel stupid for not understanding irc, but I have never used it before...

I use 'xchat', and it asks me which channel I want to join after connecting to irc.freenode.net. At that point, you type in #startups. Or you can usually do /join #startups from the command line.

Thanks - see you on irc, I guess ;-)

Hey, pidgin supports IRC?! Trying.. yup, I got it to work! Pretty easy: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Protocol%20Specific%20Questi...

Feel free to mail me if you'd already read that, and I can help you get it working. I'm really glad I saw your comment, so I feel like I owe you :) Now if we could just integrate IRC presence into the IM interface..

> I feel stupid for not understanding irc, but I have never used it before...

I never got into irc until recently -- one of my friends recently said the difficulty in getting started is part of the reason IRC hasn't gone the way of slashdot or digg or reddit :)

Thanks, that worked! The trick was to join via the "Buddies->Join a chat" menu, rather than trying command messages.

Heh...

CTCP Version is just testing your client, so basically the server is just checking what irc client you are using.

Similarly, there is CTCP ping that you can ping someone to see if their connection is still alive.

Both you can ignore, you want to /join #channel, /part #channel, /msg nickname, and so on.

Those commands somehow didn't work, but now I could join the channel with the menu bar. Not that I have understood all subleties of IRC yet, though. For example how is a username "secured" is there a need for action, setting passwords etc? I am guessing no?

Ah, some servers have a 'nick server' that enforces password protected nicknames.

In this case, if you aren't logged into a registered nick, it won't let you join any channels.

So, /nick Obscure234232 and then you are good to go :)

You can also use www.mibbit.com to connect ;)

you should really add GET parameters that will let you go straight to a channel with a url and be logged in with a random username.

Good idea. Work in progress...

http://www.mibbit.com/irc.freenode.net-startups

Actually works now, but only for that server/channel at the moment. Also my ident server is down so login is a little slower than it should be.

It'll log you in either with your mibbit username if you're known, or with a random mibbit session nick.

mibbit.com/irc.freenode.net/startups seems like a better format, no?

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