Home of Poi: HOP IRC Chatting

Okay, here's the deal.

I know there are other threads about hop chats, but they're pretty much all people asking about it and nothing about people telling it, so I'm hoping to pump it up a little bit and get a few more people in there. Right now there are only about 3-4 people who sit in there, mostly idle through the day, and we have very little in terms of new faces to talk to. Right now there are over 120 people looking at the HoP forums, if we could just get a small chunk of those people into chat it would become a much livelier place. Plus it is a great way to actually talk with someone outside of static messages on a forum.

There are really a couple ways to get to the hop chat. There are also actually a couple different rooms right now created specifically for HoP and spinning but I'll get into that later. If you're just looking to chat every once in awhile the web relay that is up through this site is great (many thanks to flid). It's not always up though, and can be a fickle creature at times and is limited to the one room. However, if you want to check it out and the relay is not up, there is a solution!

GET mIRC! (or any IRC client for that matter)

http://www.mirc.com/get.html

Now if you have no idea what IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is, think multiplayer notepad

It is a very 'simple' chat program, that has been around for a long time, and has an incredibly massive community with literally hundreds of servers, and thousands of different chatrooms with literally hundreds of thousands of users.

While the program itself is relatively simple, it can be confusing for non-computer savy individuals, so I thought I would give a bit of a tutorial on how to get yourself into chat.

Once you have mIRC installed, when you open it the IRC Options window should automatically pop up, where you need to fill out certain details like your nickname, and alternate nick (incase the one you pick is already taken)

At that point, on the left hand side you'll want to click where it says 'Servers' to take you to the server menu. In the IRC Server dropdown menu, you'll want to find the listing 'Newnet: Random Server' There are other ways to get there that are more stable, but this is the easiest. Once that is done, click the 'Connect To Server' button.

At that point it will open up a server window while it connects to the server. Give it a few seconds, to let it establish. Eventually it will spew out a long string of text, since you're connecting to a random server in the 'Newnet' network, the intro text might not always be the same, but you'll know what it is when it happens. Once that is finished you're connected to the server, but still not in the chat room. At this point you'll have to tell the server your first command which I've high-lighted in an ever so stylish orange color. That command is very simple.

/join #homeofpoi

That in turn will open up another window, which is the actual chat room. From there anyone active should be able to talk to you and help you out with any other issues you have with IRC. I can help address anything in here if you guys have questions, but I didn't want to dominate this thread with the tutorial.

I just know that the HoP chat used to be much more active, and it was a wonderful resource for me when I was first learning to spin a few years ago and I feel bad to see it wither as it has. I would love to see it return to its former glory, and with the growth of HOP I'm sure we could easily surpass that. I'm hoping it is mostly due to people simply not knowing about it rather than not wanting to or being able to.

I hope to see more people popping in

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#homeofpoi -- irc.newnet.net Come talk to us we're bored

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