So...the guy who made mIRC finally stiffened up on people abusing the whole "wait 10 secs to press continue" thing, and so being the broke person I am, I decided to try some of the other IRC clients out there. (QuasselIRC, the other client I demonstrated in the last tutorial is nice for using IRC, but lacks some of the features needed for rapid moderation, and is therefore not acceptable for my needs), so with no adu at all, here's my tutorial on "Connecting to IRC for beginners using XChat"
Getting the program onto your computer
Windows:
Xchat has an installer for Windows, however there is a quirk with xchat on Windows, unless you compile from source yourself, XChat is shareware, not freeware. Meaning that after the 30 day "evaluation" period, you are supposed to pay the 20 dollar registration fee. I say "supposed to", because there is no "lock-out" mechanism that prevents you from using the program after the 30 days are up. Issues of morals are not my concern, so I will just deliver that information and move on.
The XChat download for Windows:
http://xchat.org/download/
Mac OSX
There is no official version of XChat for Mac OSX, however, there is an offshoot program called "XChat Aqua" for OSX. Personally speaking, I do not own a Mac, and as such, have no idea if this program functions anything like the Windows and Linux versions, and as such, can't guarantee that the remainder of this tutorial will work if using XChat Aqua. As such, I recommend another IRC client on Macs such as QuasselIRC or even the Chatzilla plugin for Firefox if you don't need a real IRC client.
For more information about XChat Aqua, including download links, visit:
http://www.uplinklabs.net/~tycho/projects/xchat-aqua/
Download and run the installer.
Linux
Xchat will likely be found in your system's package manager.
Running the client
After installing the client, run it as any normal program. When the program starts, you get a dialog like this:
The "User Information" is where you put the "global" information about yourself. Nick name is the name that will display in the chat for you. Second choice and third choice are alternates in case your main nickname is taken. User name and real name are things used for semi-internal purposes, you can enter whatever you want here. (Isadora is the name of my computer, if you were wondering.) The checkbox under the "network" list should remain unchecked else this dialog won't display when you start, which is an inconvenience if you need to switch servers.
On the topic of servers, click the "add" button next to the network list and type a meaningful name. I used the name of the server, GeekShed.
Now with the newly created server selected, click edit, this dialog will display:
The add/remove/edit next to the top box work as they say. There should be a default "newserver/6667" in the list already, so select it and click "edit'.
Servers in this list are in the ServerUrl/PortNumber format. For Geekshed, the server the IRC room is on, the url is irc.geekshed.net and the port is 6667, so the format for it would be irc.geekshed.net/6667 in this case.
Leave all other settings as default until you reach the favorite channel section. In here, you can press the ... button to add servers to automatically join when you connect.
Connect Command is for advanced connection options.
NickServ and Server passwords are where you can enter your NickServ and server passwords, if needed.
Everything else should be fine at default settings.
Close that dialog, and press connect. You will connect to the server and join channels, if you added them.
And it's as simple as that, hopefully some of you found it helpful.
