MANvsGAME, IRC Chat, and You

March 16, 2011

Ok, lets face it. The recent problems with the JTV chatrooms are quite bad, particularly when it comes to more populated casts. In a cast and community where chat interaction is one of the most important qualities, it is important to be able to get in a chat room situation where you have at least get an opportunity to get your voice heard. Even if you are a troll, everyone should have a fair opportunity to chat with the caster and all of his or her fans. This post will be an information base for you, MvG and JTV viewer, to help you get out of those overflow chat blues and back into the energy of the main chat room of the MvG cast (or any cast for that matter).

Before I get into any specific ways to solve the problem, it needs to be addressed that the issue of split chat rooms will not be a permanent thing—-at least as this moment. I want to point you to a quick update on the situation from the JTV team to give you the most up to date info on the chat concerns: http://community.justin.tv/forums/showthread.php?p=31353

Understand that all of us would rather have just one chat to deal with, but that just is not possible at this moment. However, there are outside ways for you to get the access to a cast’s main chat room by going around the JTV site and using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) chat clients to do your chatting. After all, chat rooms throughout JTV are based in IRC servers. Detailed below will be two different possibilities for you to use in this process, mIRC and Chatzilla. I will point out beforehand that the two IRC possibilities discussed in this post are Windows options. Mac users will unfortunately have to look elsewhere for instructions on IRC clients supported by Apple, such as Colloquy.

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mIRC: How To

I will be discussing here the processes necessary to connect to the MvG chat network through the IRC client mIRC, which can be downloaded for free here at http://www.mirc.com/. The client itself comes with a 30 day free trial, but you may use it for free past that 30 day mark as well. I would encourage you to pay for a license however if you choose to use mIRC regularly—the license comes in at $20. When downloading the client, I would also encourage you to get the most recent version of mIRC (Version 7.19).

Startup

Upon starting up the client itself, you will be prompted with a window similar to this one:

 

At this point, you will want to put in your JTV username at your nickname. Anything else will not help you here. The alternative name is not required here, and I went ahead and used my username again for the name slot. Feel free to put anything in that slot and e-mail slot as you choose, as the only important thing here is the nickname/username.

Next, go over to the area I highlighted in the last pic and go under the server menu under the categories list (Connect—>Servers). You will hit a screen such as the one below. There will probably be folders upon folders of possible IRC servers for you to join—you can delete those as you see fit. Otherwise, go ahead and hit the ADD button for the next step.

 

Upon hitting the add button, you will hit a screen such as the one below.

All the information in the above picture is for the MANvsGAME IRC Chat server on JTV. The description (what you name it) is completely up to you, but I called it MvG IRC for my reference. Then fill the IRC Server and Ports boxes what the information found above. Your password you will use to get into the server is the same as your JTV password. You must enter in your JTV password (along with having your nickname as your JTV username), or this process won’t work. It is just as if you were actually signing on to JTV.

Once you have finished adding the IRC server into your list of servers, you should take you back to your list of servers. Find the title for the IRC server you just added in, and hit SELECT. You will back at the first screen where you entered your nickname. Go ahead and hit CONNECT towards the bottom of the screen. You should then see a window that will look something like this (without the red background).

If you made this far, you are pretty much all set. At this point, just enter in /join #manvsgame to get into the main chatroom, or /join #manvsgame-# (# being a number from 1-5 usually) to get into any of the sub chat rooms.

Optional Stuff

I’m sure you don’t want to have that black and white background and awful font type when reading the chat, am I right? Well, you can fix that for yourself—just go up to the menu bar and go to View—>Font for the font type, and View—>Colors for the background color.

mIRC will notify you when someone enters or leaves a room each time it occurs. If you want to get rid of that extra spam, go up to the menu bar and go to Tools—>Options. From there, go down the category list and find the options menu under DISPLAY. You’ll see a screen like this one.

Upon getting to that screen, hit the tips button and proceed to uncheck the Join/Part check box under the Channel Tips section. Feel free to uncheck all those boxes if any of them are checked, as it’ll reduce the amount of extra spam message your chat window receives.

If you have any other questions with mIRC, feel free to ask me through my twitter (@DuffmanA) or in any of the MvG chat room channels during the nightly casts. I’ll help as best as I can for ya!

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Now, fellow JTV Viewer and Moderator 13th_Arcana has a guide for you on a Firefox extension for IRC, Chatzilla. This is for FIREFOX users only.

What you need:

You only need ONE thing, and that’s the web browser, Mozilla Firefox. If you have that, then proceed to go to the following link to install the Chatzilla add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chatzilla/

Once you have that, we may now proceed to…

The Set-Up:

After downloading the add-on, you’ll be prompted to reset Firefox, after doing so, you can now find Chatzilla under the Tool option.

Upon opening the IRC the Chatzilla window should appear at the top of the screen, click the Chatzilla tab and then press Preferance (as shown in the picture here): http://img46.imageshack.us/i/setup2i.jpg/

After that another window should pop up as shown right here: http://img141.imageshack.us/i/setup3m.jpg/

From here just follow the numbers…

  1. Select Global Settings
  2. Click on the Startup Tab
  3. Under Auto-Connect URL, click on Add.

Another window should appear prompting you to “Enter item to add:” now here type EXACTLY what is shown below VERBATIM (or just copy and paste it into yours):

irc://199.9.249.114/,needpass

Yes… the comma and the word, needpass is also required.

After you have typed that in, click OK. Then at the Preference window, click Apply and then OK. The Preference window should now close; if everything is done properly you only have two more steps to go. Back at the main window look at the LOWER LEFT corner of the screen, you should see a button of some sort.

http://img200.imageshack.us/i/chatzillasetup1copy.jpg/

Click it and a menu should appear, select Change Nickname. A window should appear and in the box you should type in your JTV username. Once that is done, close Chatzilla and reopen it. Now, along with the main window, a second window should now pop up asking for a password, there all you have to do is type in your JTV password you use to log-in. If everything is done correctly, a MASSIVE amount of text should appear, if you see the word, MOTD at the end of all of it, then you my friend have SUCCESSFULLY logged into one of JTV’s IRC channels. Finally, at the command line type, /join #manvsgame to enter the main chatroom, if you like to visit the other rooms, type, /join #manvsgame-#, where the # means… a number. Just remember the main chatroom is considered to be room 0 so then the next one will be 1, then 2, and so on. Keep in mind, when using an IRC chat, only the basic emotes will be available so none of that kappa face will be shown.

Additional Set-Up:

I should also mention that Chatzilla also notifies you in the chatroom when someone has either left or entered the room, and since MAN gets a lot of viewers at once, this MAY annoy the ever loving Hell out of some of you. If you want to get rid of that notification, go back to Chatzilla>Preference and select the Global Settings again. Then, click on the Appearance tab and look for: Conference mode limit and set it to 1, this will allow you to NEVER seen any notifications of when someone has entered or left.

And there you have it; everything SHOULD be set up perfectly with Chatzilla so that you can chat with MAN at the main chat (should room permit) or with other in the different chats, just be aware, you can only have a max of FIVE different channels opened at once. If there is anything else you wish to know, feel free to send me an email via xiii_arcana.manvgame@yahoo.com.

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Hope these tutorials help some of you who are looking to get into the world of IRC. It’s not EASY persay, but it is definitely worth it once you get things set up for yourself. Consider it…a VIP gift from us to you, MvG viewers. Happy chatting!

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  1. druminfected

    just wondering if the chatroom issues finally fixed now. I haven’t had no issues myself recently.