real time chatting with IRC

tilde.town has a local IRC server which is the primary means of real-time interaction on the town (though not the only one). please abide by the code of conduct, and contact a moderator if you have problems. volunteer moderators are designated as ops in the main channel (they'll have an '@' in front of their name)

It's strongly recommended that you check out our etiquette guide.

the chat command will automatically start an IRC client (weechat) and connect to the server. if you have opinions about IRC clients, you can also use irssi.

channels

our chat is divided up into "channels" which are reflect various topics of conversation. Channel names are prefixed with a "#" symbol.

When you run chat you automatically join our main chat, #tildetown.

• /list command gets a list of channels

• /join command lets you join other channels, for example:

  /join #bots /join #music /join #tildetown

NOTE: that most talk takes place in #tildetown, so unless you invite a conversation with someone in some channels other than #tildetown, there is not much use in sitting around on other channels waiting for people to join, or for others in the room to respond to you. This is just a result of the number of active users on this server.

Other useful commands

• /me will output special text in the chat room like so:

  /me leaves for a minute

  • YourUserName leaves for a minute

  /me adjusts the dials on their foot massage robot

  • YourUserName adjusts the dials their foot massage robot

• /date gets the current date of the IRC server. Since sometimes chat messages have a time-stamp printed next to them, you can use /date to check how long ago that last time stamp was written.

• /query OtherUserName opens a private chat room with a user called OtherUserName

An incomplete list of channels, sorted by activity:

• #tildetown: main general chat; pretty much any topic is welcome here, but noisy/intense discussions may be asked to be moved to one of the more topic-specific channels
• #backalley: a #tildetown alternative. for when things get busy in #tildetown :D
• #bots: IRCbots/games; can be extremely noisy at times as people test out bots
• #projects: talk about what sort of creative endeavors you're working on
• #tildemush: discuss development of the town's in progress MUSH
• #dumpsterfire: political/current events/controversial topics; venting and heated discussions
• #share: share literally anything, feel free to promote your projects here too!
• #engines: cars, motorcycles, machine nerds, etc.
• #music: share songs, talk about music
• #abookclub: discussions about books/reading
• #witches
• #tildeplays
• #go: discussion about the board game go/weiqi/baduk; includes a crude ascii goban bot
• #tokipona: tokipona-language learning/practice/discussion; non-tokipona language use is welcome, fluency not necessary
• #ttbp: dev updates, troubleshooting, etc. for the feels engine
• #math: talk about mathematics (at any level) - needs to be more popular than it currently is
• #mafia - A good old-fashioned game of Mafia.

IRC Bots

Our chat is full of bots. They range from funny to useful to occasionally hostile. See the irc bots wiki page for more information about bots.

Registering your nickname

Registering your nickname in IRC is recommended. It means that no one can impersonate you in chat. While the likelihood of that is probably low, you can start to rely on a registered nick to automatically gain moderation powers in certain channels.

The instructions below are chat-specific. This means they may only work when you run the chat command on tilde.town, so other clients, such as irssi may not work with the instructions below.

To register a nick, run:

/quote NS REGISTER yournick your@email.com a-safe-password

updating yournick, your@email.com, and a-safe-password accordingly.

You'll have to set up your client to log you in, however, and it's a little confusing.

While running chat, press alt 1. then run:

/set irc.server.town.sasl_username yournick
/set irc.server.town.sasl_password a-safe-password

If this doesn't work, it might be because the server is known as localhost to your weechat. You can either quit and run chat again (and then redo the above steps) or run:

/set irc.server.localhost.sasl_username yournick
/set irc.server.localhost.sasl_password a-safe-password

If you customized your weechat config (or you don't use the chat command), this still might fail for you. In that case feel free to ask in chat for help.

Registering a channel

Registering a channel makes our IRC server remember that channels exist without people having to be in them and across restarts. Our "permanent" channels like #tildetown and #bots are registered so their topics stay the same even if the whole server is restarted.

If you have operator status on a channel (that little @ in front of your name) you might want to register your channel for yourself.

Run this:

/quote CS REGISTER #yourchannel

replacing yourchannel with the name of your channel. Now, you'll be automatically made an operator when you join the channel and any topic that is set will be remembered.

You can query the current topic with /topic directive.

/topic

Anything about Foos, Bars, Bazs, and the like.

To change the topic, use the /topic directive followed by the topic text:

/topic Something that isn't so tedious

tildeverse IRC

~town is also part of a wider network of tildes: tilde.chat. The tilde.chat network is run by member nodes (currently ~town, tilde.team, and yourtilde.com) and exists as a place to share and collaborate with other tilde members.

To connect, you can use the configuration settings on the tilde.chat site and connect with those credentials.

or, you can follow these steps to connect through the ~town node:

In chat (a wrapper around weechat):

/server add tildeverse 127.0.0.1/7766 -autoconnect
/connect tildeverse

The main channel of the tildeverse is #meta, which you can join after connecting to the network (/join #meta).

Connecting through the town node grants you access to the town-only channel #town. All other channels are shared across tildes and will be visible to other tilde members.

tilde.chat has the same expectations of culture and sharing and kindness as the internal IRC chat. Come share the love. :)

How to stay connected

If you're tired of disconnecting and reconnecting to chat, you have a few options.

You can start using the command tmux or screen to preserve your session on tilde.town. Here's a guide to tmux.

You can also use the GNU screen command, which we've made a quick guide for.

You can also do a more advanced thing to get IRC connected directly to your computer (instead of via ssh). This is called SSH tunneling.

Example Configs

Some of our users have made versions of their IRC-related config files public to spread the word.

• ~nilaky wrote a brief guide for configuring weechat to make more of your settings permanent, and a guide for configuring tmux to keep your IRC connections open. (It's more of a dump than a guide, but there is a lot of useful info in here!)

last compiled: 2024-01-23 01:58:22.544311