Greetings! Now that I have set up the IRC channel, we can have a place to chat about UO and all of it's issues, be they roleplaying, bugs, cheats, 3rd party servers, tips and tricks, exploits, design and development, humor, whatever.

A lot of the time I may be either not present or AFK (away from keyboard), but don't let that stop you from having a good time discussing things with each other. Eventually I'll try to set up some informal chats with some of the more notable people in the UO community (though it may have to be moderated in those cases).

The rules are simple: Behave. Nothing abusive will be tolerated. If you get out of line, you may be asked to leave (or even banned from the channel). Idling for hours or days is frowned upon, but you probably won't be banned for it. :-)

For those who are familiar with IRC, all you need to do is connect to BeyondIRC and go into #uo-bones.

For those who aren't familiar with IRC, here's a few steps to get you going:

• First you need an IRC client. mIRC is an excellent one, and you can get it HERE.

• mIRC should have some BeyondIRC servers already listed in it's server list in the configuration, so just choose one. Personally I use Snowhill, since it seems to be the least hosed of the three in my list. If you don't seem to have any BeyondIRC servers listed, here's a little chart of them:

  SERVER	PORT NUMBER(s)
  irc.snowhill.com	6667, 6668, 6669, 6670
  babylon.beyondirc.net	6667, 6668, 6669
  irc.telcentral.com	6667

• Before you actually connect to the server, choose a nickname, and use common sense (and maybe the help file) to get mIRC ready.

• If you can't seem to connect to the server, keep trying. Sometimes they just aren't responding at all, or only one or two of their port numbers are available. mIRC randomly chooses a port number when multiple ones are available. Also, if you have trouble connecting to one server, try a different one. Sometimes they even have slightly different ban-lists, and you may be able to slip into one when another has for some reason banned your whole ISP from the server (auto-banning sometimes uses overkill).

• Once you're in on the server, type:

  /join #uo-bones

  And you should be in!