County Map

County List

IRC Chat

You can download mIRC from these sites.

The following instructions are for setting up mIRC, since that is the software I use. If you have chosen another IRC program, you'll need to find your setup dialogue box, and input the same parameters.

When you first open mIRC, you will see a dialogue box titled “mIRC Setup.” Click on the tab labeled IRC servers. You are going to add the Rootsweb server to the list of available servers. Start by clicking the “Add” button.

In the “mIRC Add Server” box, put in the following parameters:

Leave the sections titled Port(s) and Group blank. You do not need to enter a password, either.

Click the “ADD” Button to add the Rootsweb server to your list.

Now you need to tell mIRC who you are. Tab down and enter your name, email address, and nickname. The nickname you choose is how other people will know you in the chat channel. You also need to provide an alternate nickname in case someone has already logged onto the server with your preferred nickname.

Once this information is entered, check to make sure that Rootsweb is still selected as the IRC server, and click “Connect”.

Once you are connected to the Rootsweb server, all you need to do is join a channel. If you know which channel you’d like to join, type the following command:

/join #channelname

where channelname is the name of the channel. For example, if I wanted to join the chat for WI CCs on Wednesday nights, I’d type

/join #USGW-WI

If you don’t know the name of the channel you’d like to join, you need to see a list of channels currently open. To do this, type the following in the command line:

/list

This will open another window listing all the rooms, or channels, open on the server. Double click the one you'd like to join, and you are ready to start chatting!

If you have a MAC and wish to join the Mirc meeting on Rootsweb you need to download and install an IRC client for Mac -- IRCle or Snak.

IRCle can be downloaded from http://www.ircle.com/

One thing you should be sensitive to is that not all IRC clients interpret colored text the same way. A pretty banner with green text on a black background on a Windows system running mIRC might be yellow on pink on a Mac running IRCle.

Snak can be downloaded from http://www.snak.com/

It's available as shareware (just like IRCle). The nice thing is that it supports docking of channels, most of the same scripts that mIRC allows for the PC, and allows you to be on multiple servers at the same time.