Internet Relay Chat or IRC is a form of real time synchronous conferencing, mainly designed for group communication in dicussion forums called channels.

Unlike Yahoo Conferencing, where if the organizer of the conference crashes out or times out, the conference has to be restarted, in IRC the channel continues to exist and function irrespective of what happens to the connected IRC clients.

Twincling is a primary group registrant on freenode.net and #twincling is our official IRC channel.

A IRC server, for example, irc.freenode.net typically runs on port 6667/TCP. However, for purposes of scalability, fault tolerance and traffic optimization, all the IRC servers in a network are structured as a acyclic graph. All the channels are registered with ChanServ.

To connect to the channel, you would require IRC client software such as Kopete, KSirc or Chatzilla (a firefox plugin) and a 'nick' or a nickname. It is a good idea to register your nickname with a NickServ.

Useful commands

To send a message to NickServ asking for help type,   /msg NickServ HELP

To register a nickname say 'tinku' with a NickServ type, /msg NickServ REGISTER [password] [email]

To identify your nick wih a NickServ  /msg NickServ IDENTIFY [password]

For your convenience, we have also made available an web IRC client interface (thanks to Mibbit) that is automatically configured to connect to #twincling channel on irc.freenode.net. Just type in your nick and password, and you are connected.