Newbies guide to IRC using Hexchat

When you first open Hexchat and dialogue box will open with a list of networks that the package maintainers thought would be good to put in the list. Two good irc networks are Libera, which is mostly channels for open source software and tech related things and Rizon. You might want to change the default nicks under User Information to what you want you call yourself on irc.

If you select irc a network and click edit you can find a menu that lets you set more options, if you untick Use global user information you can select a different nick name and user name for that network than what's in global informattion there by selecting a different for that network, if you'd like a different one or your usual nick is taken. To join a channel

/join #channel

where channel is the name of the channel you want to join. If the channel doesn’t exist it will start a new one and you’ll have ops in it. Being a op in a irc channel allows you to kick people from the channel and ban them, which prevents them from joining the channel.

If you want to leave a channel, type

/part #channel

or you can even type /close

If you don’t know of a channel on the irc network your connected to you can get a list of channels from the menus. Click the server menu and then click channel list once you’re here click download list. Some servers wont allow you to download the list right away. They might make you wait a minute. 

You might want to register your nick with nickserv to keep your nick. You want to do this because some channels wont allow you in them if your nickname isnt registered. It will ask you for an email and a password you’d like to use with it. If you want to know more about using nickserv see this blog post. 

If you want to start a private mesesage with someone, type

/query nick

Where nick is the nickname of the person you want to have a PM with.  

How to use nickserv on IRC

To start registeration with nickserv on a IRC network type into your IRC client(Hexchat in this example) 

/query nickserv

It’ll open a new window to interact with the bot. All IRC networks have a different syntax so I wont go into how to register with one here. 

Type help for a list of commands, the one you want for registering is:

help register

Which will bring up instructions on how to register your nickname. 

For any command in nickserv you don’t understand I suggest you type help before them all. Explore each command. If a nickserv bot has an option to hide things on your nick I suggest you enable those. You can hide info from appearing such as your email address from showing up if someone did something like “info” on your nickname. Some IRC networks by default will expose your email address.  

Discord glows in the dark, I dont think it's safe to use

After reading this page. I'm probably not going to use Discord anymore. I knew it glowed in the dark, but I never thought it glowed that much. By some of what I read on that site it's basically like having a virus running on your system just having the client open. The following is a quote from the page that concerned me:

"Discord has been confirmed to monitor the open processes on your operating system. This is a spyware feature known as a "process logger" that is generally used to record your program usage habits. This was confirmed by the CTO of Discord in a Reddit thread.[2] In the same thread, the CTO also elaborates that this spyware feature (the monitoring of processes) is mandatory for several features of the platform. The CTO and a Discord engineer go on to claim that Discord does not use the process logger to send records of the open processes on the user's computer.

The test to prove that Discord logs processes was done again by the writer with procmon on 4/11/2019 with the features: "Use data to customize my Discord Experience" and "Display currently running game as a status message" turned off. Discord did NOT log all of the processes open this way. However, when setting the "Display currently running game as a status message" turned on, the behavior described in[2] was replicated. You can see that behavior here:"

Even though I dont care much for privacy(I use Google services), that just creeps me out. That's beyond what I'm willing to tolerate anymore.