HOW TO BEHAVE ON IRCAuthors: Lea Viljanen (LadyBug) [email protected] Ari Husa (luru) [email protected] Revised, March 1994: Helen Rose (Trillian) [email protected]1) Language The most widely understood and spoken language on IRC is English. However! As IRC is used in many different countries, English is byno means the only language. If you want to speak some other languagethan English (for example with your friends), go to a separate channeland set the topic (with /topic) to indicate that. For example /topic #channelname Finnish only!would mean that this channel would be reserved for Finnish discussion.On the other hand, you should check the topic (with /list command) before you move to a channel to see if there are any restrictions about language. On a channel not restricted by /topic, please speak a languageeverybody can understand. If you want to do otherwise, change channelsand set the topic accordingly.2) Hello/Goodbye It's not necessary to greet everybody on a channel personally.Usually one "Hello" or equivalent is enough. And don't expect everybodyto greet you back. On a channel with 20 people that would mean onescreenful of hellos. It's sensible not to greet, in order not to be rudeto the rest of the channel. If you must say hello, do it with a private /msg.The same applies to goodbyes.3) Discussion When you come to a new channel it's advised you to listenfor a while to get an impression of what's discussed. Please feel freeto join in, but do not try to force your topic into the discussionif that doesn't come naturally.4) {}|[]\ IRC has quite a lot of people from Scandinavian countries,the above characters are letters in their alphabet. This has been explained on IRC about a thousand and one times, soread the following, do not ask it on IRC: { is an A with 2 dots over it } is an A with a small circle above it | is either an O with 2 dots over it or an O with a dash (/) through it [, ], and \ are the preceding three letters in upper case. There are a lot of people from Japan as well, who use Kanji characterswhich may look quite exotic as well. As I don't know Kanji I don'teven try to explain any of the characters.5) ATTENTION! Remember, people on IRC form their opinions about you only by your actions, writings and comments on IRC. So think before you type.Do not "dump" to a channel or user (send large amounts of unwantedinformation). This is likely to get you /kicked off the channel or/killed off from irc. Dumping causes network 'burps', connections goingdown because servers cannot handle the large amount of traffic any more. 
