Gonkipedia:IRC

Come, friends, to the Gonkipedia IRC channel, where you can chat in real-time with your fellow Gonkiphiles, Gonkites, and Gonkist extremists.

Spammers, trolls, willful idiots, and general troublemakers are likely to be booted and banned from Gonkipedia's IRC channel. Everyone else is merely likely to be booted on occasion. G*nk practices tough love.

IRC Commandments

 * 1) Only discuss politics/religion with unanimous consent. If any user asks you to drop the subject of politics and/or religion, please do so right away and continue the discussion in private. The exception is discussion of G*nkism, which is the Official Religion of Gonkipedia.
 * 2) Use English. The official language of our IRC channel is Gonkian, but since it's too beautiful a language for so sordid a medium as IRC, English is what most of us speak there.
 * 3) Don't take it personally if you get kicked. You can always rejoin. Unless you're banned, which means you actually did something wrong, which means you should take it personally.
 * 4) Be nice to the newbies. How else shall the Word of G*nk be spread to all corners of the globe?

IRC Deadly Sins

 * 1) Using l33t speak. G*nk likes good grammar. L33t is the antithesis thereof.
 * 2) Bringing in your own IRC bot. The only chatbot allowed in this channel is the official #darthipedia bot Darth-2-D2, whose loyalty to Gonk is beyond reproach, since it was programmed in. Bringing in your own chatbot will result in the chatbot being kicked and/or banned. Further measures may be taken if Darth-2-D2 gets particularly pissy.
 * 3) Asking for ops or voice. Blessings are bestowed on those who patiently await them&mdash;not those who whine about it, and especially not those who say "I can haz?"
 * 4) Trolling, spamming and what not. Trolls, spammers idiots and other dumbasses are advised to take their business to #darthipedia as soon as possible. They'll ban you too, but more scornfully.
 * 5) Making personal attacks.. Don't attack other users in our IRC channel; our No Personal Attack policy applies here too.
 * 6) Attempting to translate "ko kyenga see." Ohh, you better believe that's a paddlin'.

How to join
For advanced users:  irc.freenode.net #gonkipedia irc://irc.freenode.net/gonkipedia

For others:

You can either use the standard Wikia web client in your web browser, or install a specialized chat program called an IRC client. These are available for a variety of platforms.

Windows

 * mIRC is the classic Windows IRC client. The main drawbacks of mIRC are the fact that it's not free and that the configuration options are more extensive than a lot of users are used to. (Only partial UTF-8 support&mdash;see below)
 * Trillian handles IRC. It's a little complicated to set up, but if you don't want to use the very easy CGI:IRC linked by Angela, then Trillian is a handy program to have anyway for the other things it does. (No UTF-8 support - see below)
 * Miranda IM - a multi-client, like Trillian, but rather minimalist and open source. (UTF-8 support requires patching - see below)

Linux

 * Gaim is a multi-client that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu and several other Linux distributions.
 * Kopete is a multi-client, the KDE counterpart of Gaim.
 * Konversation is a KDE application with interface similar to X-Chat; it is an IRC-only client.

Mac

 * Snak handles IRC rather nicely, and is one of the few Mac-only clients that still work flawlessly.

Crossplatform

 * Opera web browser has a built-in IRC client.
 * ChatZilla is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
 * JWChat - had some script errors in Firefox, but clicked "Stop script" and it worked fine after that.
 * X-Chat is perhaps the most well-known IRC client for Linux, included into nearly every distribution, which has recently grown in popularity on Windows as well. Note that the official Windows version (as opposed to Linux) is shareware, but unofficial free Windows builds are available, for example, here.