Status

In 2015 we were still using IRC. IRC – Internet Relay Chat – is a pretty old but robust technology for chats. It orginally works unencrypted. You need a designated IRC-client but there’s a web-browser-based solution out there, too:
webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=ism-global

We held our chats at a non-lefty host “Freenode”. Its political positions are founded in the open-source movement. There we have our own channel #ism-global .

How to use IRC

General

I’ve defined a welcome message explaining the basics: By entering our channel you get a short introduction.

Change your nickname

You can change your nickname by entering forward-slash, nick, and then your desired nickname. For example enter “/nick Waldo” (without quotation marks) and press Enter as it would be a normal message. Don’t worry, it will not be distributed to all participants but interpreted by the IRC-server. Unless your nickname is a registered one or already in use it will change immediately.

Speak to specific persons

Assume the person’s nickname you wanna speak to is “Liz” (without quotation-marks). Then you type “Liz: Hey!” (without quotation-marks). By mentioning some otherone’s nickname his*her nickname will be highlighted by most IRC-clients.

Some IRC-clients allow tab-completion: By typing the first few letters of a nickname and then pressing the tabulator-key it will automatically complete the rest. The tabulator-key is the one located on historical typewriter keyboards above the caps-lock key which is located above the shift-key. If there are several matching nicknames starting with the letter(s) you typed, pressing again tab will browse through them.

Speak to someone in private

If you want to send someone a private message – again, IRC is uncrypted – you write “/msg Walrus some private message” where Walrus is the nickname you wanna talk with. Thus a new tab opens. Therein you can send messages without typing the “/msg nickname” prolog. To end a private conversiation type “/unquery” without any parameters but in the right window.

Alternatives