Internet Relay Chat Subculture - Communication On IRC

Communication On IRC

IRC has much in common with a regular in-person conversation. It is real-time many-on-many communication that is not logged by the server for posterity (many IRC clients do offer a logging feature, but the logs are generally then not publicly available). Some bots may also feature logging facilities. Users on IRC usually refer to users "say" something (instead of posting it) to reflect the similarity with face-to-face communication.

Because IRC is a text-based communication medium, the obvious limitation of this metaphor is that the participants of a conversation on IRC do not actually see or hear each other, so alternative ways must be employed to convey the information that would otherwise be gained from facial expressions, tones of voice, and other audio-visual clues. It is common practice among IRC users to use emoticons, pseudo-XML tags (for example ...) or actions (such as *smile* or *grin*) to achieve this. Other notations common to text only media are common on IRC, such as using asterisks around *words or phrases to be emphasized*, /using slashes around words or phrases/ to simulate italics, and imparting PARTICULAR EMPHASIS to something by writing it in all capitals. Some clients also respond to "percent notations," such as pairs of %B around bold text, %I surrounding italicized text, or %C to change the text color. In these cases, a graphical environment may be required (as text terminals typically don't have such rendering capabilities as italics and color).

Orthographical and grammatical mistakes are generally not frowned upon as much on IRC as they are in other kinds of Internet forums, given the informal and temporary nature of them. If the conversation is going at a decent speed, it is not practical to correct every typo. It is similar to many instant messaging networks.