IRC
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. It is used for GnuCash to enable group (many-to-many) communication in a discussion forum, called channel. IRC in itself additionally also allows one-to-one communication.
Contents
Prerequisite
You need a program which supports the IRC protocol. Many IRC applications exist. Probably one is on your computer already. If you find one neither on your computer nor on your installation media, you should search the Internet to find one fitting your environment.
- Mibbit is a web-based IRC client.
- Pidgin (multi-platform, IM/messaging client with IRC-protocol support)
- XChat(multi-platform)
- Chatzilla (multi-platform Firefox extension)
- mIRC (Windows)
- Konversation (KDE)
- Kopete (KDE)
- Colloquy (OS X)
- Adium (OS X)
Usage
Join
Any IRC application first needs to connect to an IRC server. The discussion forum for GnuCash is hosted on the following server and has the following channel name:
server: [irc.gimp.org] (and may re-direct to irc.us.gimp.org) channel: #gnucash
In many IRC applications you will be asked to specify the server to connect to. Choose irc.gimp.org in that dialog. After that, your IRC application might have a button labeled "Join Channel", in which you can specify to join the #gnucash channel. (On the Linux application XChat, GimpNet is another name for irc.gnome.org.)
Alternatively, you can perform these two steps by entering the following commands at the command prompt of an IRC application:
/server [irc.gimp.org] /join #gnucash
If your computer had a correct setup of mime types and applications, all you would have to do is click on : [1].
Quit IRC
To quit IRC, just execute:
/quit
Public Logging
The discussions in the GnuCash irc channel are logged on a public web page:
If you want to say something that shouldn't be logged, prepend your text by the prefix [off] which should stand for "off-the-record". Lines that begin with [off] will not show up on the web page logs.
The timestamps in the log pages are given in EST (UTC-5).
How to speak up in the channel
When you join the GnuCash IRC channel, you should speak up. If you have a question, please ask it right away.
But then you should wait. Don't expect an answer right away. Sometimes you'll get an answer within seconds. Other times you might have to wait several hours until one of the core developers wakes up. Please be kind, and please wait in the channel.
Note that many of the active participants in that channel are active only during US daylight time, corresponding to timezones EST (UTC-5), CST (UTC-6), PST (UTC-8). Other participants are active only during Europe daylight time, GMT (UTC+0) and CET (UTC+1).
