2. Introduction

There has been a great increase of groups and people who post stuff in ABA/ABMA that won't do fills in the newsgroup, but request you get them from IRC. This small section is a guide on how to accomplish this. This is not a large tutorial on the use of IRC, but just a practical guide to get what you need. This guide requires little knowledge, so if you have used IRC before just skip to the section you need to see.

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and as the name indicates is used for chatting (real-time communication with other users). These discussions are organized in so-called channels. Besides chatting there is also the option of transferring files through DCC (Direct Client Connection) or CTCP (Client To Client Protocol). The channels are organized on servers of an IRC-network. There are a lot of those IRC-networks with Dalnet (http://www.dal.net) and EFnet (http://www.efnet.org/) probably being the largest for anime related binaries at this time. Of these two Dalnet seems to be the most used at the moment, so this section will focus on that network.