Although AppleInsider has no administrative control of it through AOL, there is a commonly-used chat room on instant messenger that a number of our members have used. To access this chat room in iChat, choose the File menu and Go To Chat... and enter appleinsider in the chat name field.
If you happen to get a window that reads "Empty Chat Room" then you simply have arrived when no one else is in the chat. You can try again at a later time or simply leave the window open until someone else joins.
AppleInsider's IRC chat servers are accessible at irc.appleinsider.com in channel #appleinsider
To connect to AI IRC or other channels, the following popular clients are available:
For Mac OS X users who are fond of the terminal, the freeware
epic,
BitchX, or
Irssi are also available. MacNN has also written a short guide explaining
how to compile and install epic 4 on Mac OS X or Darwin.
As with any real-time medium, certain guidelines must be observed in order to keep the resource enjoyable and useful for all. In general, users are expected to abide by the following usage guidelines while they are using AI's IRC server:
- Do not harass or attack other users. Such infractions will not be tolerated.
- Do not behave inappropriately. This includes excessive cursing or racist/sexist behavior. Channel ops will decide what constitutes excessive cursing or generally inappropriate behavior.
- Do not flood the channel with multiple lines of text such as a complete article from a Web site, repeated nick changes, all caps text, or ASCII art. In general, do not paste large blocks of content from other programs such as Web browsers. Provide links when possible.
- Do not advertise commercial products.
- Don't repeat yourself excessively. If no one answered your question, it's likely that no one knows the answer.
- Do not use excessive capitalization.
- Do not request or trade content such as pirated software or pornography.
- No unauthorized bots. If you use a bot without permission from a network administrator, you risk being banned.
- No clones or multiple connections.
- Respect the channel operators (ops). If they request that you to stop doing something, listen.
- Channel ops may set other conduct rules as they see fit.
- Do not ask for op/oper privileges. If more ops are required, we will announce this in an appropriate fashion. Do not attempt to hack ops, impersonate an op or oper, or take over a channel. Such infractions will not be tolerated.
For further questions or comments on these Usage Guidelines, please feel free to contact our IRC network supervisors via
email or on IRC.
The following IRC help pages are provided by dal.net:
