How do I get help?

First, read this page in case you can self-service your own issue. If that fails, join #help in IRC (if you can get in) or email an admin (if you can’t).

What IRC clients (apps) can I use?

Basically anything reasonably modern. We consider a client supported if it has the following features:

We consider the following clients to be “core” (preferentially supported and documented):

Finally, we also offer a slick web-based client that will work in any browser or phone, though you will need to request an account from an administrator. This account is free of charge.

Despite it not being recommended or a core app, we also have a basic guide for:

How do I connect to the network?

Point your IRC client to squick.me on port 6697. TLS must be enabled.

Refer to the guides above or your IRC client’s own internal documentation if you aren’t sure how to do that.

How do I register an account so I can stop being Dubious?

Use nickserv:

/nickserv register [password] [email address]
A valid email address is required.

Your email address is used as part of the registration (and to run password resets). We will never sell or give away your email address, and we keep it only for account management and to deliver emergency announcements during exceptional situations where using IRC itself is not feasible. Squick does not send spam.

If your client rejects the /nickserv command, try /msg nickserv instead (everything else is the same).

Be sure to log into the account once you register it.

Okay, and how do I actually log into that account?

Use SASL. If your client doesn’t support it, get one that does – see “What IRC clients (apps) can I use?”, above.

We have SASL setup guides in that section as well, which will teach you how to tell your app to log in.

If you do not use a core client and there are no official Squick articles for it, check out its documentation as a starting point.

Alternatively, the Libera Chat network has written quite a few of their own SASL guides, and odds are good that your app will be listed if it is modern enough to work with Squick.

I was on Squick before December 2022. How do I restore my old account and its settings?

You can’t. Sorry.

We scrubbed the old accounts because our rules and data policies changed dramatically during the transition (combo of political realities and software feature changes). Re-registering was deemed the best possible way to signal each user’s consent to the new rules.

On the bright side, we plan on compiling a Hall of Fame section to honor anyone who was registered when the anarchy phase ended.

Short, mostly-objective answer: mIRC is not core because it is quirky Windows-only shareware.

mIRC has documentation despite this because it can technically still connect to Squick, and a lot of long-time IRC users own a copy.

Long, mostly-subjective answer:

Editorial warning! Digi (network founder and author of this article) used mIRC as her daily driver from 1999 to 2014, and then followed its development after that in her capacity as an IRCv3 advocate and tooling developer. Digi’s opinion of mIRC has declined precipitously over time, and she has rather unkind things to say about app and its developer at this point.

I don’t care, give me the hot takes

mIRC has documentation because it is the Internet Explorer 6 of IRC. Just about everyone on Windows used it at one point, and a lot of those users still use it for (what I assume must be) reasons of inertia.

mIRC is not considered a core app because it has a license fee, is Windows-only, and is closed-source software that only added support for Unicode, IRCv3, and SSL/TLS years after they became relevant (after initially resisting numerous user requests).

It also still has extremely skeletal implementations of those things that assumes you will be scripting the events yourself. It won’t even color or badge a nickname when someone enters the “away” status, despite away-notify being an ancient and trivially-implemented IRCv3 feature! Forget about things like link and media previews, or account verification – mIRC still doesn’t even have a user-friendly way to manage automatic connections to multiple nets built into the core. You have to go fishing deep in the raw configuration files or script that too.

Since mIRC consistently trails behind other IRC clients in terms of usability, and its users are charged for the pleasure of its mediocrity, it should be avoided unless you’re already used to its quirks.