How to participate in IRC communication/id

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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) adalah sebuah sistem komunikasi daring. IRC merupakan sebuah bentuk komunikasi instan lewat Internet. Ia didesain untuk komunikasi grup (banyak-ke-banyak) dalam forum diskusi yang disebut dengan channels, tetapi juga dapat dilakukan komunikasi satu-ke-satu. Yang dimaksud dengan komunikasi dalam sebuah sesi IRC adalah satu channel. Pengguna dapat bergabung channel (dengan menggunakan perintah /join #nama_channel) dan kemudian mengirimkan pesan, yang akan di-relay ke semua pengguna dalam channel yang sama. Pengguna mengakses jaringan IRC dengan menghubungkan sebuah client ke server. Terdapat banyak implementasi client dan server. Kebanyakan server IRC tidak mensyaratkan pengguna untuk login, tetapi seorang pengguna harus menentukan sebuah nickname sebelum tersambung di IRC.

Komunitas grass menggunakan channel tersendiri di (#grass on irc.freenode.net), silakan untuk bergabung. Juga ada banyak channel yang lain terkait dengan GIS seperti #gdal, #qgis, #mapserver, #osgeo, #proj dll.

Mereka yang tertarik untuk turut mengembangkan Debian GIS project dapat bergabung dengan channel (#debian-gis di irc.oftc.net). Sebuah channel #geo juga tersedia pada jaringan yang sama.

Logs of communication

Thanks to Gary Sherman (QGIS project) and his friendly 'sigq' IRC bot, the communication is archived:

• GRASS (#grass) - http://logs.qgis.org/grass/
• OSGeo Foundation (#osgeo) - http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/
• QGIS (#qgis) - http://logs.qgis.org/slogs

How to do it the first time

1. Get a IRC client software (see software list). We like the Chatzilla extension for Firefox, gaim, xchat and on MacOSX the Colloquy software.
2. Connect to IRC, for "our" channels to a freenode.net server (list of servers).
3. Define some settings: Here some useful commands which you will enter into the field to also enter the communication (be aware to not start such commands with a space!). Anything started with /command will not be visible to the others:

Web based alternatives to join a channel (don't forget to select a reasonable nick name):

• Use the OSGeo Web interface to IRC/#grass
• Use the Netsplit JAVA interface to IRC/#grass

# select nick name
/nick yournickname

## better don't show your email address:
/ns set hide email on

### register (only one time needed) - PW is in clear text!!
/msg NickServ register [password] [email]

### identify yourself to the IRC server (always needed) (xxxx == pw)
/msg NickServ IDENTIFY xxxx

Join a channel

/join #grass

Now you will see (depends on your client) the list of people lurking in the channel. You may convey your greetings and go ahead for conversation... See below how to automate the identification process.

http://grass.itc.it/images/irc_chatzilla.png

The communication is logged (see #grass archives).

Some useful hints

With chatzilla and other clients you can set your nickname in the preferences. You can also open several channels at time. It's convenient to automate the identification.

Chatzilla auto-identification

You can put the next command as "autoscript" into chatzilla's settings for each channel, see Edit -> Preferences -> Global Settings -> Startup tab -> Auto-url [someone please verify this, probably it's sufficient to type below one time into chatzilla]:

# auto-identify yourself to the IRC server (xxxx == pw)
/network-pref autoperform msg nickserv identify xxxx

To quickly open the GRASS channel in Chatzilla, simply click here: irc://freenode/grass

Try to find the next freenode server to have speedy connection (e.g., Italy: irc://calvino.freenode.net/grass).

TAB extension

A nice feature is to use TAB key for type completion of nick names in the channel - just try it!

IRC Ghosts

If your communication crashed, it can happen that your nick is still online, a so-called "ghost". When you login again, an underscore will be added to your nick name. To takeover your own nick name, you have to kill the "ghost" by entering next command with your password (takes some seconds):

# kill ghost after crash (xxxx == pw)
/msg NickServ ghost yournickname xxxx

The nick server will then remove the "ghost" and give you your nick name back.

Further reading

• Wikipedia article
• FAQ freenode on user registration and more

This page is in progress of translating to English from Bahasa Indonesia.