Net etiquette on IRC
People on IRC form their opinions about you only by your actions, writings and
comments, so think before you type. If you use offensive words, you'll be frowned
upon.
It's not necessary to greet everybody on a channel personally. Usually one "Hello!"
or equivalent is enough. And don't expect everybody to greet you back... On a
channel with 20 people that would mean one screenful of hellos. It's sensible
not to greet, in order not to be rude to the rest of the channel. If you must
say hello to somebody you know, do it with a private message. The same applies
to goodbyes.
Also note that using the event response feature, (the "ON" command for
instance), to automatically say hello or goodbye to people is extremely poor etiquette.
Nobody wants to receive autogreets. They are not only obviously automatic, but
even if you think you are polite you are actually sounding insincere and also
interfering with the personal environment of the recipient when using autogreets.
If somebody wants to be autogreeted on joining a channel, he’ll autogreet
himself.
Do not "dump" to a channel or user, (send large amounts of unwanted
information). This is likely to get you kicked off the channel or thrown entirely
off IRC. Dumping causes network "burps" and connections going down because
servers cannot handle the large spikes of traffic.
Never take offense if somebody appears to snub you by ignoring output from you.
Bear in mind that there are ninety-nine possible technical reasons for this, among
which is the possibility that he or she may not even be seeing your output.
The most widely understood and spoken language on IRC is English. However, as
IRC is used in many different countries, English is by no means the only language.
If you want to speak some other language than English, (for example with your
friends), go to a separate channel and set the topic to indicate that. On the
other hand, you should check the topic before you move to a channel to see if
there are any restrictions about language. On a non-restricted channel, please
speak a language everybody can understand. If you want to do otherwise, change
channels and set the topic accordingly.
There is remarkably little tolerance for foreign languages on IRC channels, and
with good reason. If you would like to practice your Spanish there is a large
number of Spanish speaking channels you can go to. Do not go to an English speaking
channel and start to speak in Spanish or any other language. That is downright
rude.
You should not criticize or draw attention to other peoples spelling or grammar.
In the first place, it’s ludicrous to expect anybody to work at a computer
keyboard in a "live" situation without errors – but more importantly
you have no idea whether the person you criticize is fluent in the language being
used, or even marginally literate.
Other prohibited and discouraged actions include:
o Any behavior reducing the functionality of IRC.
o Harassing another user. Harassment is defined as behavior towards another user
with the purpose of annoying them.
o Annoying a channel with constant beeping, face getting and version or gestalt
requests. Odds are that behavior like that will get you kicked.
o Many channels frown on excessive use of color or use of color at all. Colored
messages often cause problems for people that have a background color set up.
Black is very popular for example.
o If you have a question to ask the channel, do not ask if you can ask the question!
Just ask it, and if someone feels like answering you'll get an answer. If not,
then please do not keep repeating the question. They heard you the first time.
Net etiquette on IRC