Scouting on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and other chat forums
IRC general information
For those who are new to IRC, check out this
short IRC primer,
which also contains links to IRC software.
IRC is a multi-user online chatting system that allows users to talk to other
users all around the world via the Internet.
You will have to find a (local) IRC server to connect to.
IRC users are identified by nicknames of their own choice. Nicknames may
be at most 9 characters long. The nickname is set via preferences or the
/NICK command in your IRC client.
Communication on IRC is done via Channels and Private Messages. Channels
have names starting with # (public channels) and & (local) and usually up
to 12 characters long. You can see a list of the channels currently in
use via the /LIST command issued to your IRC client. As soon as you join
a channel with the /JOIN command, everything you type is sent to that
channel and seen by all other users on that channel. You will see what
the others type, respectively.
Channel #scouting
This is a IRC channel reserved especially for scouting topics, available on
many of the IRC networks (but not on ScoutLink since the channels there
are more specialized).
Other channels
Since it is easy to open a new, temporary, channel, often special channels
for special events will be created, such as #jota.
See also Jamboree on the Internet.
ScoutLink
And there is
ScoutLink,
an IRC network especially for Scouts, with (a few) dedicated servers.
ScoutLink also has an WWW IRC chat service (using Java), on
irc.scoutlink.net.
Other chat forums
One of the more recent devellopments on the World Wide Web are the on-line
interactive chat forums. This is quite like IRC, but it works from within
your web-browser (e.g. Netscape).
See this page.
Back to the InterNETional Scouting Page
David.Jansen@strw.leidenuniv.nl
Last modified: Mon Jan 8 20:24:27 2001