Feb 24, 07
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haha but i definatly need a "wind down" after this week so hopefully if we are having on this thursday I will be out there 
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Feb 27, 07
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not this week for me i have other arrangments
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Feb 28, 07
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Ok. I have money set aside. I'm there like a fat kid on cake
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Mar 01, 07
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 Frequently Asked Questions about mIRC. Home Latest NewsDownload mIRC How to Install Translations Message Board Intro to IRC IRC FAQ Intro to mIRC mIRC FAQ Command List How to Register Mailing Lists IRC Networks Chat Links More Info This is FAQ version 61, revision 1 Latest FAQ Update: November 23rd, 2006 It may be a good idea to download this mIRC FAQ and read it off-line? This FAQ attempts to answer the most frequently asked questions about the Winsock IRC client mIRC, developed by Khaled Mardam-Bey. This FAQ will only answer simple questions on IRC itself since lots of info is already available on that. (Eventually read the IRC Intro included in mIRC). Not all functions and features of mIRC are explained in the FAQ; it merely serves as a good starting point. With the FAQ I hope to help you to get all possible basic problems solved, and to give you lots of good ideas about mIRC's scripting capabilities. I'm not the author of mIRC but I've spent quite some time beta testing it. I love mIRC for its small size, speed and useful tools... in particular, the popup menus and the scripting section are really great! Thanks Khaled, for an excellent proggie ! This FAQ as well as mIRC is still a work in progress! Most subjects in this file were prompted by questions in the Usenet newsgroups alt.irc.mirc and alt.irc.questions. Recently some mIRC dedicated message boards have been added to the mIRC website who offer more support and contribute to the FAQ in a great way! Please continue to post your questions there (and answers as well), as those places are my learning place as well. ;-) This FAQ might not be totally complete yet, but to the best of my abilities I try to be correct. Do not hesitate to provide additional information or corrections for the FAQ. The first part (Sections 1 - 6) of this file is the actual FAQ. The last part (Sections 7 + 8) consists of a tutorial or reference manual for mIRC’s "programming" features. If you want to learn the 'what and how' of creating Aliases, Popups and Remote Commands and Events in mIRC, check out the last part of this file. I can highly recommend these sections to you all! Thanks to all the people who voluntarily contributed to this FAQ. In particular Mookies, Bryan and Li0nheart for making additional parts and html-ing. Shorty, Keyman and Qasimtoep, thanks for fixing a lot of spelling and grammar bugs! Thanks to Junyor for his contributions from the alt.irc.mirc FAQ. You can e-mail me with FAQ related remarks at: tjerk@mirc.com Questions about mIRC are best asked in the message boards or at help@mirc.com As usual, direct all mIRC bug reports to Khaled at: khaled@mirc.com If you have further questions about mIRC, please visit the IRC channel #mIRC on EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet or Dalnet. BUT, if you ask a question that is really well handled by this or other FAQ's, then please accept that you be pointed back to this or other help files. The latest info on mIRC will always be found on the mIRC Home and FAQ www pages or one of the mirror sites in: http://www.mirc.co.uk/ (United Kingdom), http://www.mirc.com/ (USA), http://mirc.kems.net/ (Kuwait), http://www.mirc.co.za/ (South Africa), http://www.mirc.queen.it/ (Italy), http://www.mirc.com.ar/ (Argentina), http://mirc.eon.net.au/ (Australia). Copyrights - You are allowed to provide and distribute the mIRC FAQ -as is- by or on any medium as long as you make it available for free. You are not allowed to change anything in the file or charge any amount of money for your services. If you want to copy only certain parts for whatever use, make sure to mention my name and the FAQ as the source of information with every single quote whenever you publish it. © copyright 1995-2006 Tjerk Vonck tjerk@mirc.com Table of Contents SECTION 1: What is mIRC? SECTION 2: Latest news on mIRC. SECTION 3: What do I need to run mIRC? Where do I get it? How to register? SECTION 4: Short introduction to IRC. SECTION 5: Some short notes, tips and tricks. SECTION 6: Features, tips and Answers to Questions.
mIRC attempts to provide a user-friendly interface for use with the IRC network. It has a lot of features some of which are : UTF-8 support with font linking. A powerful dynamic /help command. Netscape, Mosaic and MS Internet Explorer support .... surf the www waves !! An 'off you go' Toolbar.... and even Tooltips ! A very handy Switchbar. A user programmable menu bar. A simple and smart CTCP commands and Events handler. Support for wav and midi sound files. Colored text to ease reading. Simple, fully configurable aliases. Configurable popup menus. Full DCC Send/Get/Chat support including passive DCC. Full configurable fonts and colors and support of bold, underline and reverse text. Built in Ident and Finger server. A simple but powerful and safe built-in File server. Programmable Function keys. The various parts of the program have been designed with the aim of simplifying and speeding up your IRC sessions. mIRC is made to be very configurable... there are a lot of simple switches you can use to personalize mIRC to your needs. And unlike a lot of other IRC programs mIRC still gets more and more mature every new version. You can define your own commands and implement your personal reactions to commands others give to your client. All this does not make mIRC a bot program, and it doesn’t even support IRCii scripting and possibly a large number of other things... But it has much of the same functionality, thanks to the Remote Commands and Events and various other features... and what do you need a war script for, anyway? I think mIRC will help you to focus on the main point; IRC is for Chatting .... Return to the table of contents. 2 Latest News on mIRC... (What is new in version 6.21) As always this new version of mIRC addresses many of the issues reported since the last release. A lot of time was spent tweaking features and fixing bugs. We worked on the installer, logfile handling, script error handling, as well as a handful of other things. Only a few new features and functions have been added, making this mainly a bugfix release. The mIRC installer has improved a lot! The installer now offers several pre-defined modes that allow you to choose between an Upgrade, Full or Custom install. It ensures that backups of old files are successful, reports error and aborts the installation if it failed for some reason. The IRC Servers dialog now uses a treeview to display the servers list. In response to this change the format of the servers.ini file has changed to accomodate for a larger amount of servers. The DNS routines have changed so that on connect the retrieved pool of IP addresses is randomised to spread the load across connections. Preparing for a fully Vista (the new Windows) compliant version of mIRC several changes have been made. These incluse minor cosmetic issues, icons, a new help file in .chm format, etc. Also a command line option has been created that makes mIRC avoid all use of the registry. If this switch is used, mIRC stores registry information in the mirc.ini file in a [user] section, and does not modify registry to support irc:// links etc. This comes handy when you want to run mIRC from a memory stick or similar device. A lot of changes have been made to the way mIRC names and stores logfiles. This is mainly done to prevent file corruption and loss of data when you open multiple server connections. mIRC tries to name and rename logfiles as smart as possible. Also, when settings are changed in the logging dialog, the logging state of windows and any open log filenames are now immediately updated to reflect the new settings. In previous versions new settings were only applied when a new window was created. We hope to have smashed the confusing 'flash' and 'beep' options by adding a "Default" menu item to System Menu Flash/Beep items, allowing channel/query/chat windows to use the default settings as set in the Options/Sounds dialog. And disabling sounds in the Sounds dialog now does actually disable -all- sounds, even those using /splay or /beep. ;-) For experienced users and scripting enthousiasts this new version has heaps of fixes, changes and other little thingies to play with. Some of the more useful changes for scripters are: an extension to the /toolbar command that allows you to customize your toolbar, it now has a new switch that makes mIRC remember your current toolbar settings and reload them automatically the next time you run mIRC; the /window -h behaviour has been fixed so that you can hide Status windows from the switchbar; the on WAVEEND event now triggers as it should; Regular expression support has been improved and resolves gpf and speed issues in the previous version; script $error handling should work better now; and /drawrot is now much faster. We encourage you to explore the versions.txt file for all changes. Some changes are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how they work. What was new in version 6.2? (July 28th, 2006). Of course this new version addresses the buggies and most of the other comments and remarks we received after the previous release. Apart from that Khaled spend lots of time on the UTF-8 support that was added in the previous version. As you might know UTF-8 is a font encoding system that allows you to use fonts with strange, international characters. That of course helps a lot if you want to chat in your own language! mIRC's default toolbar is now customizable through a /toolbar command. You can add, move and delete buttons, add your own icons, and of course, attach your own commands to them. By popular demand also a treebar has been added. This lists network connections with channels, queries and other open windows, much like the switchbar. It behaves like the switchbar in many ways as well. You can expand and collapse trees, just like you would expect. Right-clicking on an item pops up the usual menu for that window. Right-clicking in an empty area of the treebar pops up a menu with various display options. The treebar width can be set by dragging the border with the mouse, and jsut as with virtually all other windows the background and text colors can be set in the colors dialog. Just like the toolbar the treebar can be repositioned to the top/bottom/left/right of the main mIRC window! In this version several UTF-8 related bugs are fixed, including bugs with text wrapping and copy/pasting from UTF-8 "display" or "encode" enabled windows, and bugs relating to the order in which SJIS/JIS and UTF-8 encodings are applied. Much more important is that UTF-8 support has been greatly enhanced in this version of mIRC to allow people all over the world to chat in their own languages, with their own fonts, with a lot less hassle then ever before. To do so support for font substitution/font linking has been added. This allows mIRC to display all characters needed, regardless of the font you are using, assuming you have the required fonts on your system, somewhere. mIRC will try to match font sizes etc. To speed up the process Khaled has implemented his own caching routines to enable fast font/character referencing. Various other changes include:
You'll have to dig through the help file in mIRC and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Some changes are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how they work. May we invite you to visit the Message Board on the website with all questions you might have? The board offers great help with everything related to mIRC! Thanks for using mIRC, lots of fun on IRC. What was new in version 6.17? (February 17th, 2006). In this new version Khaled added support for displaying UTF-8 text as unicode to mIRC. This works in status, channel, query, and other windows, and in nickname listboxes, window titlebars, switchbar, and tooltips. The display of UTF-8 can be enabled by default for all windows in the Options/IRC/Messages dialog, or individually for any window you like via the Fonts dialog. Use the /font command to open the Fonts dialog. Make sure you select a font that contains the characters or script (hebrew, arabic, greek, cyrillic,...) you want to see! The Fonts dialog also has an "Encode" option that encodes outgoing text in UTF-8 based on the script/codepage selected for that window. The Encode feature is selective, ie. it only encodes the parts of an outgoing message that are not already in UTF-8 format. It also takes into account if the IRC server is fully UTF-8 enabled or not. Various other changes:
With this release we hope to address the most important comments, and remarks we received after the release of the previous version. We tried to focus on fixing things like the (few) freeze/gpf issues relating to SJIS/JIS and while/continue/break statements in scripts, as well as a handful of others - making the mIRC 6 series very stable. Only a few new features and functions have been added. You'll have to dig through the help file in mIRC and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. What was new in version 6.15? (June 3rd, 2004). With this release we hope to address the most important comments, requests and remarks we received after the release of version 6.14. The new version fixes quite a few small bugs found in the previous versions. We tried to focus on fixing things, making the mIRC 6 series more an more sturdy, and only few new features and functions have been added. With this release we hope to address the most important comments, requests and remarks we received after the release of version 6.14. The new version fixes quite a few small bugs found in the previous versions. We tried to focus on fixing things, making the mIRC 6 series more an more sturdy, and only few new features and functions have been added.
With this new release we think to address the most important comments, requests and remarks we received after the release of version 6.12. The new version fixes lots of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version. Among them the much discussed tooltip gpf bug and a daylight savings time offset bug. While we tried to focus on fixing things, of course some new features and functions have been added. Although some of these new things, like the SSL support, might have to mature a bit over the next versions, we think it is fun to play with them already! A few items I'd like to mention as useful changes:
What was new in version 6.12? (October 13th, 2003). mIRC v6.12 has been released to address a remote vulnerability found yesterday, capable of crashing your mIRC. The vulnerability affects versions of mIRC from v6.0 onwards, so it is highly recommended that you upgrade to mIRC v6.12. You can do so by downloading the new mIRC from the download page on mIRC's website! This version is merely a bugfix version. Although no new features have been added it is very important that you upgrade as soon as possible. If you have questions, may we invite you to the message board on mIRC's website? These discussion forums offer great help with everything related to mIRC and its features. What was new in version 6.11? (October 10th, 2003). With this new release we hope to address the comments, requests and remarks we received after the release of version 6.1. Of course this new version fixes lots of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version. Details of all changes are available on the news page. Have fun and download and try mIRC 6.11! Several commands have been fixed or improved, like the /fwrite, /hdec, /mkdir, /qmsg, /qme, /color, /hload, /hsave and /server not using the specified port. Lots of identifiers have been fixed, among them $duration(N,3), $base(), $os, $comcall(), $dllcall(), $md5() and $mask(). This also fixes a possible /userhost exploit problem. A channel folders join bug where mIRC wasn't setting focus on a channel window properly was fixed, as well as a a small problem with the red dot in remote toolbar button, bugs with binary variables, duplicate separators in popup menus and a menu handling bug that affected the favorites popup menu as well as various other menus under Windows 95 and NT. Over 40 thingies, all fixed :) While we tried to focus on fixing things, of course some new features and functions have been added. Among them the language selection option that has been added to the MS Agent speech dialog. You must of course have the required language component installed. Read more on http://www.mirc.co.uk/agents.html, the Favorites folder that now allows multiple selection. You can now join multiple channels, or folders with channels!, at a time, a nifty new feature that has been added to allow you to auto-hide the list with nicknames in a channel. See the nick list options in the System Menu of each channel... As you see - heaps of changes and improvements. Lots of little and larger changes to smoothen your IRC experience. You'll have to dig through the help file and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Information on changes in older versions is available in the versions.txt. If you have additional questions, may we invite you to the Message Boards on this website? The boards offer great help with everything related to mIRC! What was new in version 6.1? (August 29th, 2003). Lots of things have been fixed. Like the default browser issue, a /background bug, an editor dialog bug that most likely was the cause of odd script problems, a memory bug relating to registry handling, a /whois related memory bug, a problem with background pictures, and a popup menu resources bug. Lots of other things have improved; All Socks5 firewall error messages are now displayed correctly, double-clicking on web/ftp hotlinks now displays a warning dialog before the site is opened, and an important change was made to the way files are created, opened, read, etc. for window logging, dcc sends/gets, and the list channels dialog. The amount of files opened for logging, sends/gets, etc. is no longer limited to a maximum total of 50 or so open files. DCC commands, such as /dcc send, ignore, etc. are now also handled in the form /dccsend, /dccignore, etc. and should also allow /dccallow etc. Khaled is now using Visual C++ .NET 7.0 to compile mIRC. This also means nicknames are sorted a bit different, nicks beginning with certain non-alphabetic characters eg. _ ' etc. are being placed above normal nicks. This appears to be the standard sorting method in Windows, which Visual C++ abides by consistently. It now applies to the whole of mIRC. Support for the .jpeg extension has been added, custom file-handling commands and identifiers which allow you to open multiple files for reading and writing. A file type ignore warning explains why a file transfer is ignored, with a direct link to the options dialog, dcc ignore section. Also a new section was added to the servers.ini file from which mIRC will select an initial network to connect to. mIRC no longer defaults to DALnet. Lots of interface changes this time; Check out the visual styles and new buttons, dialogs, menus etc. A single toolbar button replaces the previously separated aliases, remotes and popups button. The red light is now on when any of ctcp/event/raw are enabled, and off when they are all disabled. A right-click on the toolbar button displays a most recently used files list. At first this looks a bit odd, but it will just take some getting used to. With the color scheme option you can switch between different color schemes easily. And scripters, there is lots of fun for you; with the $ event prefix the matchtext section of a remote event definition can now contain a regular expression! Binary variables no longer have an upper limit on the number of bytes that can be stored. And $compress() and $decompress() functions have been added that compress/decompress files and binary variables. The result is raw compressed data. Khaled managed to load a multi-megabyte file into a binary variable and compress, encode and write it to a new file, and then reverse the process. Fun stuff eh! The "enable" sounds option in the sounds dialog now affects most sounds, including highlight, notify, window/icon flashing, etc. Sound requests and Agents still need to be enabled/disabled individually. This does not affect the use of sound-related commands in scripts. Pressing Control-C while marking text in a window now copies the text and cancels the mark process. It took eight years to think of that. It's all about quality you know ;) Remember how you can 'collapse' all windows you have opened on a network into their status window with Alt+F1? The status window switchbar button now displays the highlight state of all associated windows hidden with Alt+F1. Disconnecting via the file menu/toolbar/disconnect command now results in a soft disconnect, allowing any pending server info to be displayed. Incoming data will not trigger scripts, etc. during this time. Eg. if you connect to EFnet, and then disconnect, EFnet sends a "Closing Link" message to the client. Past versions of mIRC wouldn't display that since they were performing a hard disconnect. Since this version has far too many improvements, new features and functions to mention here in detail you'll have to dig through the help file and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Information on changes in older versions is available in the versions.txt. If you have additional questions, may we invite you to the Message Boards on this website? The boards offer great help with everything related to mIRC! What was new in version 6.03? (August 16th, 2002). With this new release we hope to address most, if not all, of the comments, requests and remarks we recieved over the past weeks. We tried to focus on fixing the few but annoying buggies found in the previous version, but of course added quite a few new features and functions. The 'perform on connect' sorting mistake has been fixed, also the numeric 330 bug, the flickering menubar and toolbar, the ! on INPUT processing bug, the $read and a similar freeze bug with invalid filenames, a switchbar multi-line display bug, dcc ignore bug, a /timer bug, and a bug in the highlight feature are fixed. The $ticks has changed back to the old method because of a bug in Windows' high performance timer... *mumble* Other fixes are the /load command that could trigger multiple on load events, a proxy authentication bug, the $asctime() bug, a small dcc server ignore bug, and an important memory bug in script parser, where mIRC checks if a script has been loaded/unloaded while a script is running. mIRC now supports several IRCX events on any server that sends them, not just for IRCX servers, it will (again) try to rejoin a channel even if it was +i or +k, we improved the way mIRC determines what default web browser you use, rewrote the mark/copy routine, and added a $nick().idle property that returns the idle time for a person on a channel. You can also use this idle time feature in the nick color list dialog in the addressbook! Since this version has far too many improvements, new features and functions to mention here in detail you'll have to dig through the help file and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Information on changes in older versions is available in the versions.txt. If you have additional questions, may we invite you to the Message Boards on this website? The boards offer great help with everything related to mIRC! What was new in version 6.02? (June 6th, 2002). With this new release we hope to address most, if not all, of the comments, requests and remarks we recieved after the release of version 6.01. Several changes are initiated by the multi-server features introduced in mIRC 6.0. You might want to check out how the 'perform on connect section' has been moved to the connect section, near the server settings, and allows you to specify a different set of commands for different networks, and how basic features as the /aop /avoice /protect and /ignore commands now allow you to specify a network name. The multi-line switchbar options in the display dialog have been extended, mIRC no longer closes a channel window on reconnect to a server if you have keep channels open enabled, no longer attempts to rejoin a channel on reconnect if the channel was invite only or if it was locked and mIRC didn't have the key. Changes scripters will like include the $ticks which does no longer wrap around every 49.7 days, custom dialogs that no longer require an ok or cancel button, and new events like on CONNECTFAIL that triggers when a connection attempt including its retries has failed. Fancy new things have been added like the Alt+F1 key combination that hides all windows associated to a status window switchbar button 'in' that button. Try it and you'll see what I mean! Several more or less annoying bugs have been fixed;
mIRC 6.01 addresses most, if not all, of the comments, requests and remarks we recieved after the release of version 6.0. We'd like to emphasize the new visual style dialog that allows you to set and change frame styles (borders, lines and bevels), switchbar buttons, and a new option to disable support for irc:// chat links. Several more or less annoying bugs have been fixed; a socket bug which that very likely caused the crashes some of you have been reporting, a connection retry bug which may have resulted in wrong nicknames, channel prefixes and nick mode prefixes, etc. Other fixes are;
What was new in version 6.0? (February 3rd, 2002). You'll notice lots of little and larger changes to smoothen your IRC experience. Lots of 16bit-specific code has been removed from mIRC's routines. 16 bit related memory issues, kludges and bugs are solved. The new multi-server feature required major internal changes to mIRC's code and forced improvement of code in many areas which has undoubtfully resulted in an even more stable mIRC! Working on this important new feature we focussed on keeping mIRC as it always has been; no-nonsense, robust, -working- :-) We tried to keep the changes to the scripting language etc, as clean as possible. Upgrading should be fairly painless. We really recommend you to download and try mIRC v6.0! Changes, improvements and new features: As usual the new MIRC offers heaps of changes and improvements. Lots of little and larger changes to smoothen your IRC experience. Since mIRC 6.0 is no longer available in a 16 bit issue all references to the old 32 and 16 bit distributions have been removed. Lots of 16bit-specific code has been removed from mIRC's routines. Lots of 16 bit related memory issues, problems, kludges and bugs are solved. All dialogs in mIRC should now use standard dialog fonts for the version of Windows you are using. When running XP, mIRC now uses your XP theme for dialogs, buttons, etc.... Some of the many many improvements, changes and fixes in this new mIRC are;
Still a multitude of ID's, identifiers and commands has been changed and added to support the new parallel connections. Everything in mIRC now has an unique id number; all windows, server connections, dcc sends/get/chats, etc.... You know by now that you have to dig through the help file and whatsnew.txt to get hold of the complete list of changes and their impac t? Don't forget that ;-) Information on changes in older versions is available in the versions.txt btw. If you have questions, may we invite you to the Message Boards on this website? This discussion platform offers great help with everything related to mIRC! What was new in version 5.91? (June 15th, 2001). As usual the new MIRC offers heaps of changes and improvements. Lots of little and larger changes to smoothen your IRC experience. Although this version is merely a bugfix version, several functions and features have been added or improved. Among the bugs you might have noticed is one that messed up the merging of popup menu's. In this new mIRC complete menu's from different scripts will merge properly. Also fixed are bugs in $eval(), $var() and small thingies in the 16 bit mIRC. A problem with the /whois on query option not working in single message window is solved. Overall there aren't many things you'll notice but all together enough to make your upgrade worth the trouble. Scripters should note that $null has been completely removed as a value. This has some potential to break your scripts. When you use $null in a script, mIRC now converts it to an empty value, instead of the value "$null"!
We think most of you will be happy with the simple things like $input(), $read() instead of $read, and $style() for popups. Also $eval() is nice, and please note the parser change for [brackets]'s!
This version has far too many improvements, new features and functions to mention here in detail. I'll point to some of the simple ones here - the ones you might encounter right away;
mIRC's new version fixes most, if not all, of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version 5.8. Some prominent ones are;
All you mIRC scripters will love this version for its load of new features. You know by now that you have to dig through the help file and versions.txt to get hold of the best among them. Some things you might miss there are the old /closemsg command since the /close handles closing query windows a-ok. Also gone from the documents are the $sdir, $file, $hfile, and $dir identifiers that are still supported but are no longer documented in the help file. Please remove their use from your scripts and use their new alternatives! In the future mIRC will no longer support them. What was new in version 5.8? (September 5th, 2000). Buggies fixed: mIRC's version 5.8 fixed most, if not all, of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version 5.71. Some prominent ones are a bug in the Agent support that made Agents speak channel actions even if only private actions were enabled, a bug in the highlight feature which was matching against nicknames incorrectly in some cases, and a small bugger in the flood protection. Improvements and new features: This version has far too many improvements, new features and functions to mention here in detail. I'll point to some of the simple ones here - the ones you might encounter right away;
What was new in version 5.71? (May 7th, 2000). mIRC's new version 5.71 fixes most, if not all, of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version 5.7. mIRC's new version 5.71 has far too many improvements and new features and functions to mention here in detail. I'll point to some of the simple ones here - these are the ones you might encounter right away;
What was new in version 5.7? (February 2nd, 2000).
3 What do I need to run mIRC? Where do I get it? How to register? Requirements - Besides running MS-Windows you need to have an Internet account and a properly installed Winsock. If you can use FTP, E-mail, News or other Internet programs from within Windows already, you can safely assume you have both. If you do not have your Internet access properly configured on your PC you should deal with that first. Distribution - mIRC is spread over the world by advanced distribution schemes of primary and mirror FTP sites, which makes it available from hundreds of places all over the world. The most up-to-date list of places where you can get mIRC is the download page on the mIRC Homepages... You could also join the IRC channel #mIRC to get the latest version or to ask all remaining questions... (But: be very sure this FAQ doesn't answer your question) Registration - mIRC is a shareware program. This system of distributing programs, as shareware, shows the true spirit of the Internet. You can download mIRC for free and give it a try. If during or after the 30 days evalution period you decide to continue to use mIRC, you're asked to pay a small registration fee of $20. This will allow Khaled, mIRC's author, to go on developing and supporting mIRC with the same spirit and enthousiasm as he has shown in the past 6 years. Your registration of mIRC will support the future of mIRC's www pages for help, hints and support and encourage the development of mIRC, its help files and the FAQ. :-) Once you registered one version of mIRC, you're allowed to use all future versions for free! The mIRC help file and the registration page give you all information needed to register mIRC. You will see mIRC can be registered online with a credit card. If you feel uncomfortable about using your credit card online, mIRC can also be registered by faxing your credit card information. If you don't have a credit card, you can also send a cheque or money order by postal mail. Return to the table of contents. 4 Short Introduction to IRC. (Read more in the IRC Intro file included in mIRC (!) and available on the mIRC www pages) What is IRC - IRC stands for "Internet Relay Chat". It was originally written by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988. Since starting in Finland, it has been used in over 60 countries around the world. IRC is a multi-user chat system, where people meet on "channels" to talk in groups, or privately. There is no restriction to the number of people that can participate in a given discussion, or the number of channels that can be formed on IRC. All servers are interconnected and pass messages from user to user over the IRC network. One server can be connected to several other servers and up to hundreds of clients. Several larger and smaller IRC networks exist. On IRC several people can join the same channel and see each other. Depending on its topic and time of the day a channel can be VERY crowded. Channels can also be quite chaotic, or calm. Channels can be open to everyone but also closed and private and only open to friends. On the large IRC networks (EFnet) as many as 20000 channels can exist, on smaller networks there will be fewer channels. Channels on IRC are dynamic in the sense that anyone can create a new channel, and a channel disappears when the last person on it leaves. Language - The most widely understood and spoken language on IRC is English. However, as IRC is used in many different countries, English is by no means the only language. If you want to speak some language other than English, (for example with your friends), go to a separate channel and set the topic to indicate that. Similarly, you should check the topic when you join a channel to see if there are any restrictions about language. On a non-restricted channel, please speak a language everybody can understand. If you want to do otherwise, change channels and set the topic accordingly. Greeting - It is not necessary to greet everybody on a channel personally. Usually one "Hello!" or equivalent is enough. Also, don't expect anybody to greet you back. On a channel with 20 people that would mean one screenful of hellos. It makes sense not to greet everyone, in order not to be rude to the rest of the channel. If you must say hello to somebody you know, do it with a private message. The same applies to good-byes. Also note that using your client's facilities to automatically say hello or good-bye to people is extremely poor etiquette. Nobody wants to receive autogreets. They are not only obviously automatic, but while you may think you are being polite, you are actually conveying yourself as insincere. If some body wants to be autogreeted when they join a channel, they will autogreet themselves. Behaviour - Remember, people on IRC form their opinions about you only by your actions, writings and comments, so think before you type. If you use offensive words, you'll be frowned upon. Do not "dump" (send large amounts of unwanted information) to a channel or user. This is likely to get you kicked off the channel or killed from IRC. Dumping causes network "burps", causing connections to go down because servers cannot handle the large amount of traffic. Other prohibited actions include: * Harassing another user. Harassment is defined as behavior towards another user with the purpose of annoying them. * Annoying a channel with constant beeping. (Therefore most clients cannot beep at all) * Any behavior reducing the functionality of IRC as a CHAT medium. How to join IRC - The first time you run mIRC you have to fill in some information about yourself (your real name, email address, nickname, IP address and Local Host name) under File/Setup/IRC_Servers and Local_Info, as well as the IRC server with which you want to connect. It's usually best to connect to a geographically close server. When you're new to IRC just pick a server from the prefab list. On IRC you are known to others by a nickname. You are free to choose any nickname you like, up to 9 characters long. Do not use spaces and avoid unusual ASCII characters in your nickname. It is possible you find people that use the same nickname and you may be asked to switch nicknames to avoid confusion. Getting started - To join conversations, send private messages, and to handle and control mIRC you need to learn some simple commands. All commands start with a forward slash, the "/". Anything that does not begin with "/" is assumed to be a message to someone and will be sent to your current channel, or to the person you are chatting with in a private chat (see below). A list with the most used commands on IRC is given in the mIRC help file. Finding your way on IRC - To join a channel, type /join #channelname. Try "/join #irchelp" or "/join #mirc" to give it a try... That's it! Once you get to the channel, you will see people talking. It will probably look like this:
Read the help - As soon as you joined your first channels and spent some time on IRC you will see there are a lot more commands and possibilities for you to discover on IRC. You might want to read the full version of this IRC Intro on the mIRC www pages. Almost all specific capabilities of mIRC are explained in the help file that came with the package. You just have to do the reading. :-) Books about IRC and mIRC. - There are several good books available that give a fairly complete introduction to IRC. Mind you; the IRC Intro included in mIRC tells you about the same for free, ...and this FAQ tells a lot more on mIRC! Please read our special books section for more information. Return to the table of contents. 5 Some short Notes and Tips on mIRC. 1. Protect yourself from viral infections on IRC by never ever accepting files from strangers, and by never ever opening executables, scripts or other files that could contain macro's. And use a good virus scanner for every file people sent to you! 2. The Channels List dialog has improved a lot. Full Channel Name and Topic search is supported in an easily understood dialog and you can now make mIRC filter away all unwanted channels by simply setting search and suppress keys. Parents can easily filter away offensive channel list items and password protect their filtering ! But if you need better kid-safety dont rely on mIRC and check out Kidlink IRC, Netnanny or Cyberpatrol. 3. The /uwho command provides you with an improved interface with information on the person. You can store and fetch user info and addresses and view all kinds of ctcp information in it. 4. The help menu has been made dynamic to display all .hlp files in mIRC's directory, as well as the text files like the readme.txt, versions.txt, and update.txt files, for quick access. Also internal aliases are added that match the help filenames, so if you have the file "ircintro.hlp" in mIRC's directory you can type /ircintro ! (like /help ) You can add whatever help files you like to mIRC's help menu! Besides the mIRC FAQ, the IRC Intro file is also available in windows help file format from the mIRC www pages. 5. You can protect yourself against people who are flooding you with the new automatic anti-flood system. Look under File/Options/Flood/. A server usually disconnects you for sending too much data to it in a certain period of time, *or* if you try to send it data when it hasn't finished processing your previous data. The new flood protect makes sure -others- cant make you to send tooo much data to the server. Usually a server has a buffer of about 512 bytes. mIRC therefore counts the number of bytes you've sent to a server and if this exceeds a certain number, mIRC waits for the server to be ready again, before it continues sending data. In the mean time it nicely buffers unsend lines. This should protect you properly from all sorts of ctcp floods and so on... You set the amount of bytes mIRC may safely send (for instance 450 bytes), the amount of lines it may buffer (like 20), the amount of lines it may store maximal per user (like 3) and how long the flooder should be ignored (like 15 secs) by the command /flood 450 20 3 15 This flood control method *only* works for messages being triggered by other users. So you can still flood *yourself* off the server. (like with the /list command) Return to the table of contents. In the next part of the FAQ you will find the actual mIRC FAQ with features, tips and answers to questions about mIRC.
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