Welcome to DareNET2

What is DareNET?

DareNET is an inclusive, multi-purpose community centered around an IRC network. We aim to bring people together in a culture of etiquette and respect to have vibrant and fair discussions about the issues of our time in a way that celebrates intelligence, friendship, difference, sameness, the past, and the future. We currently maintain our own server and services software, which allows us to provide our users an experience not found on most other networks. To help you get started, we've provided a brief guide for new users below, so read on!

Before continuing on, we suggest reading over our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), which makes clear what is and is not acceptable behavior here on DareNET -- it's mostly common sense.

Connecting

You can connect to DareNET in one of two ways:

• By using our webchat client, which allows you to connect to DareNET through your web browser,
• or by downloading an IRC client. You can find a list of IRC clients for various operating systems here

Downloading and setting up an IRC client is often preferred by most users, though does require a bit of effort on your part. Should you decide to go this route, the server you should use to connect to DareNET is irc.darenet.org.

We also support SSL-enabled connections. For more information, please see our Using SSL guide.

I've connected... now what?

Once you've connected to DareNET, you will probably want to register an account. Why register you ask? Well, your DareNET account allows you to use all the great features we provide, such as our IRC services (e.g., NickServ, ChanServ, HostServ, MemoServ, etc.), build a profile on our site, post to the forums, creat albums and share them with friends, register your nickname (preventing others from using it), register chat rooms (channels), etc.

Now, on to the good stuff...

Registration

Registering is fast and easy, simply visit the account registration page, choose the username you'd like to use, enter your e-mail address and you're all set!

Your account username is an arbitrary name independent of your nickname. It is how NickServ, ChanServ and other services recognize you, and is used to login to our web site. Please keep in mind this is NOT nickname registration. Don't worry though, we'll cover that a little later in this guide.

The e-mail address that you use must be valid as your password will be e-mailed to it.

Authing to NickServ

Great, you now have a DareNET account! In order to use it on our IRC network, you will need to authenticate (identify) to NickServ. There are several ways you can do this, we'll explain the most commonly used commands below

/msg NickServ@services.darenet.org AUTH <account> <password>

Where <account> is your DareNET account username, and <password> is your account password. For example, let's say your account username was JoeCool and your password was aPpLe321. To authenticate, you would use: /msg NickServ@services.darenet.org AUTH JoeCool aPpLe321