How to use the IRC transport.
The IRC transport is a dynamic gateway that allows XMPP/Jabber users to
connect to IRC using their Groupchat & MUC clients.
Features
- Every
IRC network should be supported.
- A user can have many rooms open
on different networks.
- Your nick name must be the same on all channels on one irc
server, but can be different when using another irc server.
Limitations
- When using the IRC transport trying to discover rooms using a
service
browser is not currently implemented.
- Groupchat clients will only get basic chat support. All advanced
features are only supported in MUC clients.
Joining a room
To open a room you will need the irc channel name and the irc server
name. For our example we will use the channel #debian in server irc.debian.org.
To connect to an irc channel in your XMPP client you will take the irc
channel and irc server and combine them together to form an XMPP room
name. To do this you need to add the channel and
server names together using a % as a seperator. For our example you
would use #debian%irc.debian.org
as the room name in your XMPP client. You can then enter the transport
name that your
XMPP or Jabber server supplies, eg irc.jabber.org.uk,
as well as your nickname. The
nickname has to be unique not only on the channel you are joining
(#debian in our example) but
also on the irc server (irc.debian.org).
If you open more than one room to the same server they must have the
same nickname, so if I were mikea on
#debian%irc.debian.org, I
would
also need to be mikea on #test%irc.debian.org. If you try
and open #test%irc.debian.org
while logged on already the transport will use your old name, and
change your new name to match it.
If you choose a name that is already in use then the will return
an error.
IRC emote and commands
None of the special irc commands other than '/me' work. All will be
relayed to the channel.
Private Messages
Private messages sent to a member of a room will be returned as a
network user. If you try and chat to me as mikea in room
#debian%irc.debian.org then
you will get the responce from
mikea%irc.debian.org as
private messages in IRC are network based not room based.
Mode changes
All mode changes are supported only by the MUC interface.