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. Please behave as you would in real life.

There are differences, though. For example, 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, or an Action, 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.

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 looking at the screen at the moment.

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 which language to use.

You should check the topic before speaking 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:

• Any behavior reducing the functionality of IRC.
• Harassing another user. Harassment is defined as behavior towards another user with the purpose of annoying them.
• Annoying a channel with constant beeping, face getting and version or gestalt requests. Odds are that behavior like that will get you kicked.
• 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.
• 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.