How to set up mIRC

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Naggie
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How to set up mIRC

Post by Naggie »

How to set up the mIRC program on your computer


To start with, mIRC is a program to access the IRC service. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and is basically a chat system used all around the world. This guide will tell you how to get it working properly, since it can be quite hard to understand all the things in the beginning. However, this guide is far from everything. Once this is done, there are still many things to do. Many things to change to your needs. This will merely give you a start and set it up to connect to the channel we all use for Warhammer Chat.

To get started, you first need to download mIRC. This is best done from http://www.mirc.com where you should go to “Download mIRC”. You will see a list of many different mirror sites from where you can download mIRC. Choose the one nearest to where you are located and download it. A good place to save it on is on your desktop. It is only a setup file anyway. Once the installation is done, you can remove it. Remember that mIRC is free for 30 days, then it asks you to pay some money for it if you want. It won’t stop working after 30 days though, so no worries.

Once the download is done, open the setup file and install mIRC to a good directory on your computer; for example C:\Programs\mIRC or somewhere where you keep most other programs. Once the installation is complete, you might have created a desktop shortcut to mirc.exe on the desktop. Open up the program via that shortcut or go to the folder where you installed the program.

The program will launch, and open up a menu to you where it wants you to enter your complete name, e-mail address, and also your preferred nickname and alternative nickname. Fill in the information required, and then continue by clicking OK. Now, find the button called “Options” near the top of the screen. The button is made to look like a folder and a hammer. Click that one. A menu opens up to you. It is in here you will do all the required settings. To the left in that options window, there will be a tree-menu called “Category” and to the right there will be all the boxes and fields you will be required to fill in. Be patient as I take you through this.

Open the tree-menu called Connect, click on the sign of a +. Choose Servers in the submenu. Choose GameSurge in the IRC Networks menu, and GameSurge: Random server should be in the IRC Server list automatically. If not, then change to it. GameSurge is the network our chat lies on, and the random server means that your program will use the nearest or best server available for you.

On to the next submenu; Options. Tick all of the four boxes – Connect on startup, Reconnect on disconnection, Pop up connect dialog on startup (this can be turned off later on, but can be good for new users), and Move to top of list on connect. In addition, change default port to 6997. No other submenus under Connect needs to be altered. You can view them and look what they say, but I will continue.

In the next tree-menu, IRC, there are lots of boxes to tick. These ones should be ticked:
First group: Prefix own messages and Show mode prefix
Second group: Iconify query window, Use query for notify nicks, Copy messages to query and Whois on query
Third group: Rejoin channel when kicked and Rejoin channel on connect
Show in active: Invites, Whois and Away

In the first submenu under IRC, Options more boxes awaits ticking from you.
Show: User addresses and Nicks on join
Flash on: Query Message
Other three: Hide ping? pong! Event and Cancel away on message

Untick all other boxes if they were ticked before.

Next submenu, Highlight gives you the option of having messages containing a special bit of text change it colour. This is great if you add your name. All messages with your name will have a special colour, and you will notice them right away. Good, ey?
First, tick the Enable highlighting box. Then move on to click Add. A ew window will appear, and in there you write in the text, for example ”Nagathi” in the top field, then you choose a colour. Choose one that will be different from the regular colour. Try pink or purple for starters. Make sure that the Play sound is set on No sound unless you want annoying sounds to be played. Untick the Flash message box and the Case sensitive box. Set Match on to message only. Repeat this with all the nicknames you might desire. I, myself, have Nag, Nagi and Nagathi added.

Next submenu, Messages lets you decide how messages will be displayed. Tick the box Timestamp events and set the mode to [HH:nn:ss] is you want each line on the chat window to have the time shown in hours, minutes and seconds. Use [HH:nn] if you only want hours and minutes. Keep the box unticked if you don’t want any times to be shown at all.
Examples:
[17:49:35] <Nagathi> hours, minutes and seconds.
[17:49] <Nagathi> hours and minutes.
<Nagathi> no times at all.


Untick all the boxes in the Strip codes from incoming messages unless you are fed up with all the people using colour codes on their text, or bold or anything. Enter a Quit message if you want. This will be shown whenever you leave the channel. This is where people try to be funny most of the times…
Untick all other boxes on this menu page.

No changes need to be done to Catcher or Flood, but Logging is not always set correctly. Choose Both in the Automatically log option. Tick the Timestamp logs, Lock logs, Include Network, Date logfiles (set this to by month) and Except status. Choose a good directory for your logfiles. My Documents is a good place with easy access.

Now the first round of settings is done. You can close the Options window by clicking ok now.


Open it again. Close all submenus so that only categories are shown. Click on Connect. Click the little yellow and orange flower/star/sun thingy. This will open the menu where you entered the network and server. If they are not as you entered them, then re-enter them as advised above. GameSurge and GameSurge: Random server… Click Connect to server. The options window should close and the main window of the program should flash a lot of text all over. A new window appears. A window with preset favourites. Write in #Albion in the top field, and then click join. You will now enter our chat room!

However, there are still things to do. We need to authenticate you. Go to http://www.gamesurge.net/createaccount to create an account on GameSurge’s servers. Enter a suitable account name and a password. Follow all instructions given. When you are advised to auth with AuthServ (writing in /AuthServ AUTH <account name> <password>) copy that line. Enter it in the window and see if AuthServ recognises you. If it does, go to the next paragraph. If not, then make sure you have the correct names and passwords.

If you’re reading this, I assume that you authed successfully. The line you wrote to auth yourself is a very important line. If you would like to auth automatically every time you log on to GameSurge there is a function for it. Open the Options menu again (folder and hammer button as last time). Open the Connect tree-menu. Click on Options and located the button named Perform there. This handy button will give you the option of doing a lot of things automatically.

When you click the perform button, a new little window will appear. At the top, tick the box Enable perform on connect. The next thing to do is to find GameSurge in the long list of networks from the drop-down menu (or alternatively, delete all the networks you do not use from the list – they can be added later on if you decide to hang on any of them as well). When you have GameSurge in the list, you should paste that /AuthServ AUTH <account name> <password> into the big field underneath. When mIRC starts up and you log on to the GameSurge network, it will perform any actions you have written in here, in the specific order you have written them in.

After you have put in the auth line with correct account name and password, hit enter to change the line. In the line below, you can enter /join #Albion to automatically join our Warhammer channel when you have automatically authed. Now when you have authed and joined our channel, you might want to be added to the user list of #Albion. This is nothing special except that it’s cool. Contact an operator (those people in there with the @ before their names) and they can help you. The user list can easily be viewed by writing !users when in the channel. When added to the list of users, you will be given access 10 as a standard.

When you have authed, gotten that into your perform strip, and got added to the user list, there is only cosmetics left to do. Find the eighth button near the top of the screen; the one with four crayons on it. A little window with your current colours will appear. You can choose any of the preset interferences by opening the drop-down menu (mIRC Classic is pretty Asuryan, Monochrome State is pretty Druchii), or you can create one yourself. Click on New and choose a scheme name. To change some colours, click on the part of the screen (the one in the colours window) that you want to change. When it is marked, click on the palette of colours near the bottom. The chosen part will change colour.

If you want to have your own colours, you can right-click on a colour in the palette and get to a colour editor. However, if you for example change red into pink, then everyone else will still see red when you write in pink. Moreover, you will see pink when they see red. In other words, this will only change how your program interprets the incoming codes. It I just something you will see, but not anyone else (unless they also change to the colour you have chosen for red). It’s hard to explain, but I’ve done my best…


I think that was it. Now you are ready to chat on the ether. I hope you’ve understood this guide, even though it was a tad tricky to write. If I got the time and strengths to, I might add pics to make it all a bit clearer one day. We will just have to see about that. If you encounter problems, don’t be afraid to contact me on my mail (nagathi@gmail.com), MSN (same), Skype (nagathi) or PMs. You can often reach me through the chat as well (just use the Druchii.net or Asur.org Java applets to get in without mIRC). Have a nice day!

Nagathi
The Sacred Sentinel
Last edited by Naggie on 30 Aug 2005, 17:36, edited 1 time in total.
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