Introduction: Add an IRC Chatbox to Your Website!

About: I want to post something useful, after all these years on this site, *I want to post something useful*.

   As usual with my other instructions, I'll explain how I got to this point. I was scrounging around the farther reaches of cyberspace to look for a suitable I.R.C. client with a GUI interface to work with as part of my project to connect everyone I know since we've just recently graduated. After 5 days, I started to give up, then I went back to the I.R.C. Chat-room wanting to talk to some of the regulars there. Before I typed a single word, I noticed a little button on the upper left. That little button put chat-rooms on 2 of my websites. It isn't the most sophisticated, but most people can access it quite readily (which would be what I wanted at the time: Simple, Accessible, Free).

Step 1: Short Intro About IRC

(If you want to get down to business, go straight to step 2)

I.R.C. is short for Internet Relay Chat . From the name it's obvious what it is. This is how it works (today anyway): You download a program that will enable you to use I.R.C., this is called an I.R.C. client. The client asks you to select a server of your choice. Once you have connected to that server, you have the option to open up a channel list (a list of channels in that server) either with a text-based command, or a button (depending on the user interface of your client). You may connect to one (or more) channels and chat with the other users in there. You may want to search around for the list of commands as they can be useful to you yourself in the future, but for my purposes this is optional, as I'm only telling you how to add I.R.C. capabilities to your website.

Also, before I forget, you need a little bit of HTML knowledge for this to work, otherwise you wouldn't have any idea where to stick the code (to be explained).

Step 2: Grab Your IRC Client

You're not gonna download anything here, since the client I chose is web-based. Go back to the I.R.C. chat-room  and go to the bottom of the page. I was talking about a little button on the upper left corner, click on that (it's a bit small, so refer to the image). 5 options will drop down from that, click on "Add web chat to your site". What follows will be straightforward. The window will change and it will ask you to predefine a couple of options. Just click next, configure your settings, next, configure your settings, next, etc.

Step 3: Do I Have to Explain This?

Well, apparently I do. It's gonna produce a little line of code, similar to a YouTube embed code. Actually, that's really what you're doing, embedding a chat-room into your website. If you know HTML, what you'll have to do is obvious, just paste it in there to your liking. Now in case you're using a web host which uses a GUI interface, select and drop down the "custom HTML" option (along those lines) and paste the code you have into that. Now you're done! To use it, go to