Well, first off, you will need a program called mIRC. mIRC is a shareware program written for the purpose of providing a graphical front end to a little known section of the internet called IRC(Internet Relay Chat) where hundreds of people gather together in channels dedicated to specific topics and chat with each other in real time. In order to access my chat room, you will need to grab a copy of mIRC from here. It is a windows program only(sorry mac users!!!), and requires Winsock, or another such program for dialup SLIP or PPP access. Once you have a copy of the program and have installed it, proceed to the next section.
Now that you have downloaded the software and installed it, you have probably tried to run it. I will try to exaplain this as best as I can. When you open the program, you get a screen that lets you choose the server, and all that. For a server, either select Random DALnet Server, or a DALnet server that is near to your location. Fill out your real name and email address, and choose a primary and secondary nick(alias) for yourself. This is where things get a little complicated. In order to ensure that nobody can use your nick while you're not on, you need to register your nick with a password. Fortunately, with DALnet, this process is fairly easy. When you are at the main screen, type the following:
Where *nick* is the nick you wish to use, and are logged on as, and *password* is a password of your choice. Now, your nick is registered. The last step is to identify yourself to NickServ so that they know you are who you say you are. You do this by typing:
Where *nick* is the nick you registered and *password* is the password you chose. As you may have guessed, this will have to be done every time you log on to DALnet. Now that that's done, proceed to the next section...
Once you have logged on, registered and identified yourself, you are ready to access the chat room. To do this, simply type:
That's all there is to it!!!!
If you have any further question, comments or criticisms, then please send me email at sgreig@hotmail.com and I will reply as soon as possible.