Hosting Chat Communities

IRCX Protocol Commands

Chat Service supports several new commands that are defined in IRCX, the extended Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol developed by Microsoft. These new commands include the following:

In addition to supporting these commands, Chat Service enhances existing IRC commands, provides a more flexible interpretation of user masks, and supports the unicode character set.

Note   IRCX supports the use of unicode characters encoded in Universal Character Set (UCS) Transformation Format 8 (UTF-8). Because unicode provides an extended character set, users running an IRCX-compatible client can participate in chat sessions in any language.

All chat users, including system operators ( chat sysops), typically issue protocol commands from the command-line window on a chat client. You can also use an application such as Telnet to issue these commands directly through one of the server's chat ports (6667 and 7000, by default). Although this method is not commonly used, it provides protocol status information that can help you troubleshoot a server or connection.