Most of these should go without saying. I hate to have to have any rules at all, but just so there is no conflict later, these are the guidelines:

1. Type in complete, grammatically-correct sentences. Avoid the kind of drivel people use when texting. "See you later." not "C U L8R." English is the official language of the channel.
2. Avoid the big bark / little dog syndrome. Be the person you are in real life. Avoid the tedious boorishness popular with anonymous cowards on the Internet. Take the high road. Personal attacks and generalized abuse will not be tolerated. Feel free to disagree and to argue, but always be civil.
3. Racism, nationalism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, are trite. They are especially tired as a method of trolling. Please do not bore everyone else to death by resorting to them. Treat people as individuals. This is intended to be a tolerant, open-minded place.
4. Avoid needlessly pasting URLs into the channel unless they are somehow relevant to the conversation at hand. Identify the subject of all links you post in the channel along with the URL. Do not simply paste URLs into the channel without a description.
5. Avoid pasting pornography-related URLs in the channel. As a fairly liberal person, these do not bother me in a moral sense, but this sort of thing gets tired fairly quickly. If you do want to paste a URL in the channel which is at least vaguely on topic but may be a little questionable for those at work, please add "NSFW" (Not Safe For Work) after the link along with your description.
6. There are no restrictions regarding profanity in the channel, though needless obscenity intended to shock or troll could get you kicked or banned for being a jive-ass turkey.
7. Almost anything is on topic, but please be respectful of conversations in progress. An ill-timed duck joke in the middle of a troubleshooting session can be a little annoying. (A spontaneous duck joke when the channel is idle could not be better timed, however.)
8. Idling is encouraged. The channel is intended as a hangout; there may not be a conversation in progress when you arrive. Feel free to stick around and stay connected while you work.
9. Do not send private messages to other channel members until you get to know them. Do not treat the room as a pick up joint. People's locations are sometimes interesting, but their age and sex should not be. If they are, you are in the wrong channel.
10. Do not haze newcomers. Tempting though this may be, it is a far better thing to enthusiastically welcome them to the channel.
11. Holy wars are to be avoided. While it is fair to discuss and debate the merits of one technology over another, please do so with respect and constructive intent. Judging a person's worth by the operating system they use (for example) is...adolescent.

Hopefully these rules don't give the impression that this is a buttoned-down or authoritarian kind of place. They are mainly intended as a list to point to when someone goes completely off the rails. I'd like to attract people who are ordinarily unenthusiastic about IRC. To do this, we need to provide an environment that contradicts the common wisdom about IRC: that it is a place for adolescent excess, stupidity, and vapid conversation. Help me to do that.

For those who have an IRC client already installed:

Connect to the following. No special ports or password are required:

• Server: irc.sorcery.net
• Channel: #rasterburn

If you should have problems with the irc.sorcery.net round-robin, you can find a list of Sorcery.Net servers here. Click the Network link on the top, then see the left sidebar, Network section, which lists each individual server.

For those who do not have an IRC client installed:

Although there are Java-based IRC clients you can run from your browser, we suggest downloading and installing a dedicated IRC client. These include:

mIRC:

• Microsoft Windows
• Nagware
• GUI
• Recommended only because it is actively maintained and ubiquitous

Colloquy:

• Apple Mac OS X
• GPL / Free
• GUI
• I have limited experience with this and it seems to do the trick. Most Mac users I know use Snak, but this is odious nagware which will run for only 15 minutes before shutting down until you pay the developer's ransom.

XChat

• GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD
• GPL / Free for UNIX-like versions. The Windows version, mysteriously, is non-free nagware.
• GUI (GTK+) (console/text mode also available)
• This is possibly the most popular IRC client for UNIX-like operating systems. All versions except the Windows one are licensed under the GPL. XChat uses GTK+ libraries and so tends to be most appropriate for Gnome and XFCE users.

Konversation

• GNU/Linux, FreeBSD
• GPL / Free
• GUI (Qt)
• Konversation uses Qt and is therefore most appropriate for KDE users. This is what I use. It's spiffy, and free. It is still in the process of being ported to KDE 4, however. There is no port or package for OpenBSD, but you can probably download it and compile it yourself.

Weechat:

• GNU/Linux, FreeBSD (Will also compile in OpenBSD but is not in the package repository. Will compile on Darwin/OS X as well.)
• GPL / Free
• Console / Text (GTK+ and Qt front-ends also available)
• An interesting application with multiple front-ends, defaulting to curses/console (GTK+ and Qt are also available). The interface mimics that of a GUI client, with an omnipresent nick listing down the right side of the screen.

irssi

• Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin/OS X
• GPL / Free
• Console / Text
• irssi is a fairly powerful console-based IRC client, though I don't think the interface is as nice as WeeChat's. However, irssi has been in active development a lot longer and has an impressive feature set, including the ability to handle Perl scripts. irssi may give better performance over slow connections or on older terminal emulations, because it does not redraw the screen frequently as WeeChat does.