upatsix.com - Your Source For Pet Bird Information

Well, folks are starting to trickle in but there's still a lot of dead time. I figured I'd start making some posts on things that you can do when you're just hanging out waiting for people.

• Join a pre-existing channels, either #help or #upatsix - They're up 24/7. You can join a channel by typing:
  

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  /join #channelname

  
  Even if nobody's home you'll find Polly and UASBot there to play with. UASBot is a robot I'm working on that will eventually interact with everyone who joins that channel. It's polite to first say Hello to UASBot (/msg UASBot HELLO), that way it will recognize your commands. To get a list of commands available to you with UASBot, try sending it a private message with the command HELP like this:
  

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  /msg UASBot HELP

  
  Some fun commands to try would be: 8Ball <question>, UASBot <statement or question>, !coffee, !coke, !country <symbol>, !hug <nick>, !icecream, !kiss <nick>, !movies, !order and !seen - If you learn any more, you could post them here or even on the Wiki.
  
  
• Register your nick with the NickServ bot - NickServ does quite a few things but it's major function is to help you keep the name you've chosen so nobody else can log on and imitate you. It's a really handy feature. Say I was on IRC and always wanted to use the nickname JoeTester. When I logged on I could register my nickname JoeTester by sending NickServ a private message with a good password that I've made up and my email address. Like this:
  

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  /msg NickServ REGISTER mysecretpassword joetester@upatsix.com

  
  The NickServ would then send me an email with a command to paste into my IRC client and shazam!, the nickname JoeTester could only be used by me. Every time I log on afterward, I just just need to authenticate myself to the NickServer robot by typing the command:
  

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  /msg NickServ IDENTIFY mysecretpassword

  
  The nice thing is this can be automated in just about every IRC client out there. It's simple and provides my friends the assurance that they're talking to me.
  
  
• Create your own channel(s) - Try creating your own channels with the /join command. You can be logged into multiple channels all at the same time as the server has very few restrictions. If you find a channel that you and your friends like, you can always register it with another bot that's running on IRC called ChanServ. ChanServ is similar to the NickServ robot but instead of registering a nickname, it helps you register a channel so it belongs to you. ChanServ is a very powerful robot that does much more than allowing you to register the channel but it's too much to list in this post. It really needs it's own post to go over it's complete power but for it's simpler commands, just send a message like this:
  

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  /msg ChanServ HELP register

  
  or you could just:
  

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  /msg ChanServ HELP

Once you've setup your channel, just wait in it while you learn your ChanServ commands. If you end up building a good channel make sure you post it here so others can come join you.

That should give you something to do till someone comes in. I typically hang out in #upatsix and #help but I'm almost always doing a /who * to see if someone's logged in.

Happy Chatting,

Damian