IRC Chat

Please note that the chat server is inactive.

The Thunder's Place chat server is an IRC server. You can connect to it either with your own IRC client or simply by clicking on a link in the site to launch a java client.

At the bottom of the homepage and under Quick Links at the top of a page a section called Who's in Chat shows the people currently on the chat server. To join a channel you can simply click on a channel from Who's In Chat. You can join more than one channel at a time.

If you want to chat and no one is in a channel, join the channel and wait for a while. Most people had for the #main channel so to increase your chances of having a good chat, this is the channel to join.

IRC is a flexible method of communication but there are some pitfalls. In particular with DCC connections, which are not made through the server but from one client to another. Through these it is possible to send and receive files. These files could be viruses, trojans or any number of nasty things. It is important that you set up your client to not auto accept DCC transfers. IRC help has some good information on Trojans here.

This IRC server enforces the use of the same nickname used in the main forum. When accepting a file it is reasonably safe to assume that the person sending it is the same person known from the forum. Even so question anything downloaded by DCC and do not run programs without at least passing through a virus scanner.

Another pitfall it the lack of anonymity. IRC provides a range of features but the cost is that IP addresses are spread pretty freely around. If you want to remain anonymous to malicious members, don't use this service.

To connect to the server These settings will be required:

Clients will typicaly concatenate the server name and port, joining with a /. So this will be irc.thundersplace.com/6667 or irc.thundersplace.com/4667. The Username is often listed as ident name in settings. The password is not always obvious but can often be placed after the servername seperated from it by a %, in this case the servername might be similar to this irc.thundersplace.com/6667%password.

There are many IRC clients and using the settings above it is possible for most to be used with this server. The following list contains some clients that have been tested and are know to work with this server and links to local configuration advice for use with this server.

There are other options. For windows/mac/linux and others the Mozilla browser includes an IRC client called chatzilla. For linux there is also LostIRC and a number of KDE Clients.

Windows users may prefer the rather more mature mIRC to Visual IRC. It is free to use for 30 days but must then be registered. This covers all future versions. Visual IRC is userfriendly and has built in smilies.

X-chat is well known as a free linux client but it may seem less user friendly and stable for windows users.

• Visual IRC
• mIRC
• X-Chat

This server make use of ident to verify the username and with some clients this is the only way to transmit the username to the server. Ident is an incoming connection from the server to the client.

Some firewalls answer ident queries with a default response, if this happens it may prevent access. Often the solution is to block ident completely or to change to a client that is is not reliant on ident to pass the username.

When blocking ident it is important not to drop the packets but to answer them with a denial. If the firewall does not have this option, changing client may be the easier solution. Simply dropping incoming ident packets may cause initial connections to certain services to take longer as they wait for ident to time out, this is often noticable with outgoing mail.

IRC does not allow usernames that begin with a digit or those containing spaces. Usernames beginning with a digit will need to be changed to gain access to the server, please contact a technical moderator to facilitate the change providing an alternate username. Usernames containing spaces may have the spaces replaced with an underscore (e.g. Dorian Gray becomes Dorian_Gray).

Only a single connection is allowed to the server, so testing a client whilst connected with another client will result in denial of access.

In certain circumstances the client may not terminate the connection to the server cleanly. If this happens re-entry to the server may be delayed whilst the previous connection times out.