Alright, so you’ve seen the IRC tutorial we’ve posted before, but going through it might have raised some questions. Downloading a program? Installing it? That’s so… 1990s. If it can’t be done in a browser, then it’s not worth doing, right?!

Well, rest assured: you can chat with your fellow ADIers without ever leaving the browser. Just open freenode’s web IRC interface in a new tab, and we’ll be off.

Middle-click this to get a new tab with the webchat interface.

Connecting

Now, you should see something similar to this:

First, you’ll have to choose a nickname. Choose anything! You’re not tied to a certain nickname, so if you eventually find you don’t like the one you’ve chosen, you can switch easily.

Second, you’ll have to choose which channels to chat in. I’ll assume you want to chat on #adicu, which is ADI’s channel.

Third, we can leave “Auth to services” blank: we don’t need to sign into anything to use IRC.

Lastly, you’ll want want to solve the CAPTCHA. If you don’t know what a CAPTCHA is, then just try and decipher the distorted words and type them into the box below (the example spells out “arthco anecdote”). If you’re having a hard time, clicking the audio captcha box and typing out what the undistorted voice says might be more your speed.

The form should now look something like this:

Chatting

Now, the screen should spit out a bunch of text, and eventually (within 10 seconds) get to this screen:

Now you can start chatting: just click the bar at the bottom and type away!

There’s a bunch more stuff to learn about IRC. If you don’t feel like asking any of the guys on the channel (or there’s no one there, or everyone seems AFK (away from keyboard) then you can peruse Freenode’s IRC FAQ, which is quite extensive. Perhaps a bit intimidating, but also useful.