I did not yet explain how the downloading goes, but the idea is the following:
Connect to a server, join a channel, and if there are ro-‘bots’ which are offering packages of software, you request them to send the package to you.
Start the mIRC program. The following pop-up should appear:
Now select an IRC server to connect to. I choose for this example a server That has got something interesting.
Don't forget to click the 'Connect to IRC Server' button.
A popup appears on the screen. You can use it to choose a channel. By default the list is empty and unuseful, so close it.
The next screen should appear, or something like that.
Click on the 4th icon from the left. The button is called 'List channels'. Now the list of channels starts to build up, and appears is a separate window. It could look like the next picture. In the picture above you can see which button it is (it was selected)
A good guess is to join a channel that is full with people, or contains words like ‘iso’, ‘warez’, ‘gamez’ or ‘mp3’ depending what you are looking for. This is only a hint, a few times I found very nice things in channels with little people and some stupid name.
Now double click on a channel name that you choose. I changed the window size to full screen by double clicking on the title bar. Your screen can look something like this.
You can see the place where we can type anything. The cursor
is visible there. We also can see that at
We now have to type (or paste) the following: /msg {IZ}010 xdcc send #3.
Depending on how busy and how big the ‘bot’ is, it can reply a lot of different things. For example I got in this case: ‘*** All Slots Full, Main queue of size 10 is Full, Try Again Later’ In the best case the ‘bot’ starts sending the file directly, and a new window opens. Other possibilities are that you are placed in a queue for several hours.
When the transfer is successful, the file is on your hard disk, in the directory that you configured in mIRC.
It is also possible that somebody installed a ‘bot’ that acts like a fileserver. Most of the time they also send ‘advertisements’ to the channel. It could look like the following:
These ‘bot’s work with a ‘trigger’. In this example there is a ‘bot’ that reacts on ‘KaKa!’. The response is a DCC chat, where you can give commands like to a FTP server. If you don’t know how FTP-servers work, forget this option for now.