I’ve always wanted to check out IRC chat programs. Back when I started on the net, I was using ICQ a lot and then I gradually moved onto Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, then AIM and finally onto Skype and Google Talk. I met my partner of 8 years on Yahoo Chat so I’ve always had a particular fondness for chat programs. I liked being able to connect to people all over the world and make friends. I will never forget the day when I was talking to a New York teenager on ICQ who wanted to commit suicide. That was one hell of an intense conversation let me tell you!

But as with all things, I finally grew out of the chatting phase on the net. I found a lot of chatrooms being dominated either by automated spam robots or kids and their conversations were pretty boring and banal. Guys wouldn’t talk to me because they were only interested in flirting with the women and women wouldn’t talk to me because they didn’t believe that I wasn’t after sex, only conversation. So I ended up drifting away and I started to only use chat programs for staying in touch with friends, family and business clients (I currently do a lot of business networking over AIM and Google Talk).

But recently I have noticed that people have been talking to me more and more about IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I had pretty much formed the opinion that IRC was all but dead, what with the advance of the modern chat programs but I was apparently wrong. So I started looking into it as I am always keen to explore a new side of the net and if you believe the media, IRC is where all the criminals and perverts seem to hang out! Think about it, check out any novel involving a cyber-criminal and you can be guaranteed they have their own IRC chat-room!

After searching around for a suitable IRC host program, I finally settled on XChat. Setting it up was a cinch but the difficult part comes in finding a suitable network. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of these IRC chat networks all over the world and it is difficult to find a suitable one. The networks are split up into subjects and you can search for a network using something like SearchIRC but after choosing the network, you then have to choose a channel which is where all the chatting is done. By this point, you’re wondering why you’re bothering!

But if you want to create your own IRC room for chatting, just log onto a network and when it asks you what channel you want to join, create a room name. If the name doesn’t already exist, one will be created for you with you as da boss of da room. So you can have discreet little chats and then shut the room down afterwards.

If you use IRC yourself, can you recommend a good network and channel to lurk about in?

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