Originally posted by VultureCulture
hmm i never DLed something via irc. i always thought one had to ask some guy in there to hand over his IP address and give access to his mp3s, and you do the same for him... seems not.
ok, this is basically how it works. you join a channel and you see a list of operators, then users "voiced" (the + sign to the left of the nickname), then normal users. chances are all voiced users and some ops are fserve, ie, the ppl with the goodies.
other ops are just bot to protect the channel from abuse, and yes, some of them are childishly annoying implementing stupid rules.
scripts enable all fserve to periodically write on the channel a status message showing how many files are serving/queued and a banner message usually showing what they're playing now. basically this is only gonna help you find out who's offering mp3s in the room.
you have two chances: either looking for something specific with the @find <song/band name> command, which scans most/all fserves for matches, or asking any fserve to dload their list of files with the @<nickname> command. the list is always provided without you having to wait in line.
whatever you choose, at some point you have a list of files you might want to download. both in the fserve lists and in the answers to the query, all files are preceeded by !<nickname>, which is actually a command requesting the following file from the user. sometimes the nick after the ! can be different from that shown in the room, because that's the script working, but you don't have to make any changes.
then you retype or copy/paste the whole !<nickname - filename> line and send it to the room: a message follows telling you a couple of things, the most important of which is your queue position, ie, how many ppl are downloading file from that fserve before your send starts. to check queue status later on, simply write @<nickname>-que in the room.
there's not much more to know that you won't pick up along the way or reading some channel rules.
rahvin.
