The Internet Relay Chat (aka IRC) channel is a place for people to textually chat in real-time. It is recommended, but by no means required, that you learn what IRC is by briefly reading some of the IRC Frequently Asked Questions or The IRC Prelude.

Connecting

The Lojban IRC channel is on the Freenode IRC network. It is recommended that you register your nickname with Freenode, using the nickname setup instructions.

New to IRC?

If you don't have an IRC client, you can use a web interface:

• The Lojban IRC interface with Mibbit
• The Lojban IRC interface with CGI
  

The Mibbit interface is recommended because it is more stable and featureful.

Simply enter a chat nickname and click "Click to join chatroom". Easy!

Using an IRC client

Use irc.lojban.org or irc.freenode.net for the server, port 6667. The channel is #lojban. Registering with NickServ is recommended.

Conduct

There are almost always more than 25 people connected, but most of the time, they'll be idle. Say coi, and wait. Get a soda. Practice your vocabulary. But be patient. Dedicated IRC'ers don't sit in front of the computer 24/7 waiting to respond within 10 seconds of everything said. Think of it as sort of a fast moving message board.

You might also have a look at the IRC cheat sheet, which contains a list of translations of frequently used expressions.

Rules

There are just a few rules, to make sure everything runs more smoothly:

1. NO BOTS. NONE. ZERO. ESPECIALLY DO NOT DEVELOP OR TEST BOTS IN #lojban!
   • Unless they respond ONLY to ONLY grammatical Lojban, and they speak ONLY grammatical Lojban. (And even then, please do the development somewhere else, so that we don't have to watch the bot disconnect and reconnect.)
2. Don't engage in holy wars of any kind.
   • For instance, "vi vs emacs" or "java vs python" or "windows vs linux", or "democrats vs libertarians" or "chocolate vs peanut butter".
   • Expect that if an argument starts getting heated, someone will make a rules call.
3. Don't argue about copyright law.
   • Unless you've got a law degree. Expect to be asked to produce a scanned copy of your diploma.
4. The previous two rules don't apply if you're speaking in Lojban.
   • The corallary is that you can speak any other language you please, as long as you're not breaking the above two rules.
   • {zoi gy. Emacs users are stupid! gy.} is cheating. Duh.
5. Stop pasting large amounts of crap. Use URLs. Reflow the text with fmt(1). If your paste is long enough that you want to do that [[[ ]]] weirdness, use a paste service like rafb.net or pastie.org.

You'll be warned if you break one of the rules. If you keep doing it, you'll get kicked, and quite possibly banned until everyone forgets why you're banned.

Logs

Furthermore, thanks to help from Theodore Reed and Jordan DeLong, there are now public logs of the lojbanic portions of the IRC channel.

Note: the logs are filtered so that they contain only lojbanic text. However, you might still be offended by the things discussed there. If you are, that's your problem, and the LLG explicitly disclaims responsibility for anything said on the IRC channel, including by members or officers of the LLG.

Furthermore, no guarantee is made as to the correctness of the Lojban therein.