This is old news kind of, but we Ravidge has finished setting up a nice shiney IRC for us to use. After todays ridiculous Steam outage, I figured now might be a good time to post about the IRC, and what it has over Steam chat. I'll admit, I was skeptical at first, but after a little while with in the chat, I was convinced this would be better to us.
Things steam has, that IRC doesn't
* Shows ingame activity, though this can be easily altered by just using the /nick command, which allows you to change your nickname in the chat. So, for me, before going into skyrim, I just type /nick Fr0z3n_skyrim and now it changes my name to that, and everyone knows i'm in skyrim.
* Avatars
Features of IRC
Yup. If hammerbot isn't enough just to get you to at least TRY out the IRC... Then you are hopeless. (examples of hammerbot in the following posts)
Things steam has, that IRC doesn't
* Shows ingame activity, though this can be easily altered by just using the /nick command, which allows you to change your nickname in the chat. So, for me, before going into skyrim, I just type /nick Fr0z3n_skyrim and now it changes my name to that, and everyone knows i'm in skyrim.
* Avatars
Features of IRC
* notification/highlighting on typed words
- Get a sound cue when your name is mentioned, and highlight the line. Don't let anyone say bad things about you behind your back.
- Get a sound cue when a word of your choice is mentioned, like "Gameday".
- Don't get a sound cue, but highlight the lines with the word "crash".
* send files
- Reliable, tested by thousands of pirates before P2P programs and bittorrent existed.
* Depending on client: Customizable everything.
- For example customizable timestamps; I can have the year, second and timezone in the timestamps if I would like to!
- color scheme, fonts, a lot of things can be edited.
* Chatlog
- It remembers everything, if you want it to.
* Easier to reach other communities
- Not just tf2.
* Webchat, accessibility
- Anywhere with internet access and a browser.
* Reliable protocol, been in use and improved upon since 1988.
- When a server goes down on IRC, only the users on that particular server will split, the entire network will never crash (I say never because it has yet to ever happen).
- Users split will be automatically merged once the netsplit is over.
* Bots
- not just silly games, but definitely some of that too.
- Tons of available scripts to pick and choose from.
* Lightweight. Does not use a lot of memory
- Doesn't become unstable and buggy if you leave it on for extended periods of time.
- Fast startup
* Channel topics
- relay important information easily.
* Lots of good moderating options.
- kick
- ban
- kickban
- timed kickban
- permaban
- (honestly though, it has great moderating features, how else would channels with thousands of users even be reasonable, with internet people)
* Personal messages to anyone
* Create or join new channels as much as you like!
- great for temporary stuff that just happen like a channel for a tf2 highlander team.
- Or a TF2Maps admin channel, where we say bad things about you behind your back.
* Flood protection
- Limit the amount of garbage you can paste into the chat.
* Ability to see for how long a user has been idle (and total online time for that session).
* Tons of small features like timelimit ignore (Ignore a user for X minutes/hours), or ignore user in a specific channel only.
* Color, underlined, bold, italics in your messages.
- However, this is pretty frowned upon except for special situations. But it's definitely a feature.
Specific to #TF2Maps
* Hammerbot
- Will print title of youtube links.
- Will respond with helpful mapping tips to any question posed to it.
- Will print search results on google, tf2wiki and the VDC when the appropriate commands are used.
- Will print Steam and TF2 related news from the valve RSS feed.
Specific to #TF2Maps-server
* TF2M-US[server]
- Allows 2-way communication between the gameserver and IRC.
- Allows commands to be run from IRC (mapchange, time extention, nextmap, ban, anything)
- Easy to detect if server went down or restarts (the bot disconnects).
Yup. If hammerbot isn't enough just to get you to at least TRY out the IRC... Then you are hopeless. (examples of hammerbot in the following posts)
Download mIRC and Join up with #TF2Maps (quakenet - setup guide)
Or, just try out the webchat!
Or, just try out the webchat!
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