Starting Your Own IRC Chat Room With ChatZilla

It came to my attention that people don't know just how easy it is to create a channel in IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.

It's really quite simple. All you need to do is join a channel that doesn't exist!

Still, I find many people intimidated by IRC - perhaps because it requires a little bit of knowledge to use, or maybe because you don't normally have emoticons in IRC. But in Chatzilla, you have those as well.

How To Do It With SeaMonkey

I'm using SeaMonkey, which includes Chatzilla. To use Chatzilla, you'll need a Mozilla-based web browser, like SeaMonkey.

In SeaMonkey, the little icons at the bottom left have a 'cZ' at the right. Click on that icon, and Chatzilla opens right up. You're immediately given a choice of networks to use, like this (it's the second [INFO]:

[INFO] Available networks are [dalnet, efnet, freenode, hybridnet, moznet, quakenet, serenia, slashnet, undernet, webbnet].

For my channel, I chose freenode - to select that channel, all you have to do is click it in ChatZilla. Simple. To create a channel, such as mylittlecorner, all you need to do is type in the channel tab:

/join mylittlecorner

It's that simple.

Further information can be found at the Chatzilla User's Guide.

And, while supplies last, you can come on over to irc://freenode/knowprose and say hello.