IRC (Internet Relay Chat) provides a way of communicating in real
time with people from all over the world. It consists of various separate
networks (or "nets") of IRC servers, machines that allow users to connect to IRC. Some of the largest nets are EFnet, Undernet, and DALnet, but ST Frontier Fleet uses a private network, called PBEMNET.
When and where are the STFF IRC meetings?
An IRC meeting is being held on PBEMNET in the channel #FF. Currently the time of these meetings is Saturday night 1800 (GMT). Chat transcripts are being created and send to the IRC Logs list (http://lists.frontierfleet.com/listinfo/irc-logs)
It's of course possible that you join the chat at a time nobody is there (LOGGER and ChanServ are not persons). If nobody is there before midnight (GMT) then there is a big chance more people will show up, but most of STFF's European members might be sleeping if you join later. If you're lucky, Virt might be there, Guido's "Artificial Intelligence" bot, named after the famous AI on Pandora Station :-) Virt only responds when you mention his name, and sometimes he seems to make sense, but mostly he doesn't (so there is no real difference with some of the real people who visit the chat) <G>
If you really want to know, Virt is really a renamed Benzo bot, 'a pseudo-AI bot that uses a markov chain to generate funny text' (http://benzo.sourceforge.net/)
In order to get to the chat, you need to know which IRC server to
use. PBEMNET has three servers:
Note: The first two PBEMNET servers, and the Channel and Nickname services, are only active at the time of the meeting (Saturday 1800 GMT - Sunday 0600 GMT), the third server should be active 24/7.
So how do you connect to any of these servers?
In most IRC clients you can add servers to the list of servers which is provided with these programs. If you have mIRC, a tutorial can be found at http://www.frontierfleet.com/database/index.php?page=272
If you don't use mIRC, and don't know where to add the server data in your IRC program, you can always try this command:
/server server.address.here
This command connects to the server, but doesn't add it to the server list.
If you don't have an IRC client yet, you can download:
mIRC - http://www.mirc.com/
Trillian - http://www.trillian.cc/
Pirch - http://www.pirch.com/
Tutorials for other IRC clients are still unavailable, if you want to help writing them, contact any of the PBEMNET IRCops (Guido, Walter or
Bram), or contact the Webmaster, which is also Guido ;-)
Once you are connected you can use the following IRC commands:
/join #FF
to join the ST Frontier Fleet chatroom
/nick <newnick>
to change your nickname
There are more commands of course, but these should be enough to get you started.
