Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a chat system on the Internet. People from around the world can use it to have conversations together. It can also be used for two people to chat privately.^[1]

The IRC chat rooms are also called IRC channels. These channels are on IRC servers, which you can connect to by finding that server's information. This information will often begin with "irc," then a period, the name of the server, then another period, and finally, .com .org or .net. An example would be 'irc.[Servername].org'

There are small IRC servers (for example, OperaNet) to medium IRC servers (freenode and DalNet, which have about 30,000 users) and big IRC servers (for example, EFNet, UnderNet, which have over 100,000 users).

Users of IRC need an IRC client. An IRC client is a computer program that works with IRC. There are many clients. Some of these clients run in the web browser. Other clients run as an application. Popular stand-alone clients include mIRC for Microsoft Windows, and XChat for Linux and Microsoft Windows. The Opera web browser has an IRC client built into the browser. ChatZilla is a chat client which is a plugin to Mozilla Firefox.

An IRC bot is a computer program that helps control and protect channels.

The name of an IRC channel usually begins with a hash (#).

1. ↑ Kalt, C. (April 2004). "Information on RFC 2810 » RFC Editor". doi:10.17487/RFC2810. Retrieved 2022-05-04. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)