Wookieepedia:IRC



Wookieepedia's IRC channel (chat room) is where the Wookieepedia meetings (Mofferences) are held. Between these, the channel serves as a place for general chit-chat about Wookieepedia, as well as a method of quickly notifying admins about vandalism in progress or asking questions.

How to join
For advanced users:  irc.freenode.net #wookieepedia irc://irc.freenode.net/wookieepedia For others:

You can either use the standard Wikia web client in your web browser or install a specialized chat program called an IRC client. These are available for a variety of platforms.

Web client

 * Wikia has a CGI:IRC gateway for the #wookieepedia channel at irc.wikicities.com/starwars that lets you join the chat room from a normal web page. Just put in your username and choose "#wookieepedia" (selected by default) from the drop-down list.

Windows

 * mIRC is the classic Windows IRC client. The main drawbacks of mIRC are the fact that it's not free and that the configuration options are more extensive than a lot of users are used to.
 * Trillian handles IRC. It's a little complicated to set up, but if you don't want to use the very easy CGI:IRC linked by Angela, then Trillian is a handy program to have anyway for the other things it does.
 * Miranda IM - a multi-client, like Trillian, but rather minimalist and open source.

Linux

 * Gaim is a multi-client that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu and several other Linux distributions.
 * Kopete is a multi-client, the KDE counterpart of Gaim.
 * Konversation is a KDE application with interface similar to X-Chat; it is an IRC-only client.

Mac

 * Snak handles IRC rather nicely, and is one of the few Mac-only clients that still work flawlessly.

Crossplatform

 * Opera web browser has a built-in IRC client.
 * ChatZilla is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
 * JWChat - had some script errors in Firefox, but clicked "Stop script" and it worked fine after that.
 * X-Chat is perhaps the most well-known IRC client for Linux, included into nearly every distribution, which has recently grown in popularity on Windows as well. Note that the official Windows version (as opposed to Linux) is shareware, but unofficial free Windows builds are available, for example, here.

Setup instructions
To log in, you need to configure your client. After you log in, it is rather straightforward. The parameters are:


 * Server: irc.freenode.net
 * Channel: #wookieepedia (note the correct spelling)

Your web browser may be preconfigured to open IRC links in some IRC client, so you can try clicking this link:


 * irc://irc.freenode.net/wookieepedia

Most IRC clients, in particular mIRC, Miranda and X-Chat, have "Freenode" in the default network list, you only need to select it. After you are connected to the server, type /join #wookieepedia in the reply box and press Enter. If not, just add.

Custom instructions for specific clients to come.

UTF-8
The #wookieepedia channel uses the UTF-8 encoding, just like Wookieepedia proper. This should not pose a problem with English, as UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII-127, but non-Latin scripts (such as Greek or Cyrillic) may be rendered improperly in UTF-8-incapable clients.

Known issues:
 * mIRC: no UTF-8 support.
 * Miranda: requires a patch. The archive contains a file named irc.dll, which should be extracted to Miranda's plugins directory.
 * Trillian: ?

Mojibake
The Cyrillic string "тест" (Russian for "test") is used as an example.