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About NullIRC

NullIRC is a small IRC network created by a couple friends in 2002. The resulting community is small, but close. Those who stay become familiar with the other regulars and learn from and contribute to the geek think tank in the main channel #null. Though NullIRC is not a large network, the administrators ensure stable and low-latency links.

History

In 2001, Bill Fehring (bigbadbil) and Matt Sparks (f0rked) linked two Bahamut ircds. Each link ran on a FreeBSD system and a dialup connection. In the beginning, netsplits were frequent--caused by periodic drops of the dialup connections--but the two administrators pressed on and continued running the small network, as a personal project for them both.

It wasn't too long before stable broadband links were obtained with static IP addresses. More people had been invited to enjoy the comfortable smallness on the private network, and it became evident that the network was no longer just a small project. On August 27th, 2002, Bill expressed his desire to clean up the network a bit. At that time, none of the servers shared a common base domain name. Much of the community agreed that some centralization was in order, and after some debating, the NullIRC name was born. Matt bought the domain name, the servers were reorganized, and jessecrouch created the network's website.

In the three years NullIRC has existed, it has seen many links from the United States and in Europe. Links come and go for various reasons, but the links that remain are accessible and stable. The admins work for free, and have an incentive to maintain a reliable network because NullIRC is their home, too.

How to connect to the nullirc.net network

First you have to download an IRC client. You need an IRC client in order to connect to the nullirc network. Currently we do not provide any sort of website service that you can use right out of your browser or anything like that, so you'll need to download an actual program on your own. Regardless of what platform you have (Windows, *nix, Mac, solaris and even the wonderous BeOS), there will most likely be an IRC client avaliable for you. A few places to get one from:

  • Bersirc is a completely free IRC client that is currently developed for Windows, Linux and MacOS. It keeps things very simple and is a good starting client for beginners.
  • Firefox has an addon client called ChatZilla that is very easy to use. Opera has an intergrated chat client. GAIM has the ability to connect to IRC as well.
  • Use our web-based client that you can access from any browser. It has the fields filled in for you.
  • mIRC - Great IRC client for windows. Small and well organized. Lots of features you may never use, but many people will be able to help you use this one and it's real easy. Great documentation.
  • xchat - Small IRC client. Has a version for just about every operating system.
  • irssi - Sweet client for UNIX-based systems. Irssi is a modular IRC client for UNIX that currently has only text mode user interface, but 80-90% of the code isn't text mode specific, so other UIs could be created pretty easily. Also, Irssi isn't really even IRC specific anymore, there's already working SILC and ICB modules available. It's got some pretty sweet features.
  • Other clients - The three above are just some of the ones we reccomend here at nullirc. You're free to use whatever the hell you want and here's an extensive list of some other clients that are available for download.
After you get one of those, everything should be pretty damn easy after that. You start the thing and go from there. Read your client's (program - like mIRC) help files and such if you can't figure stuff out. Basic commands:
  1. You can usually type the following into just about any little dialog box that will let you enter a string of characters into it
  2. /server irc.nullirc.net - type this into your client and you should be on your way to connecting. If nothing happens, you're doing it wrong.
  3. /list - this will list all the channels on the nullirc network. Pick one.
  4. /join #channel - replace 'channel' with the channel you would like to join. Many of us are in #null, so that's a good place to start.
  5. If none of this helped you, I'm very sorry. Read all this crap instead: http://irchelp.org/ - This site contains everything you should ever need to know about IRC, or at least enough to keep you from bothering me.
  6. As a last resort, you can contact me - jessecrouch. Or you can find me on AIM as ioda006.
irc.nullirc.net