There comes a time in every man's life when they must leave the warm, moist cushioning of their mother's womb and venture forth into the cold, dark world of reality to contend with murderous clowns and surprise buttsecks. That sentence is just slightly relevant to what I'm about to say.

Dtoid IRC, sponsored by the distinguished IRCartel, is finally moving servers. No more will we have to put up with Gamesurge's suckiness. Instead, we'll be hosting the room on DynastyNet. Along with the move come a few improvements:

1) Better connections
Some people have had trouble connecting to Gamesurge's servers in the past, and we're hoping the switch to DynastyNet should fix that.

2) Voices for regulars
Dtoid IRC is not moderated (mode +m) since we've never had any problems with spam, so all those auto-voices (+v) aren't really doing us much good. Under the new system, voices will be given out to IRC regulars who have hung out in the channel and moved beyond just staying for a few days. So if you want a useless status symbol, lurk less and talk more!

3) Stats
Again, not a major upgrade, but something that should be fun to use. After a week of solid use, a channel is eligible to get daily stats collected on it, ranging from random quotes of its users to most-used words to number of actions done. These are updated at midnight every night and should be fun to look at.

4) New Ops
I can't say who quite yet, but a few long-time channel regulars will be getting ops and halfops, seeing as I'm currently the only active op in IRC. (Any previous op will get their op back upon request.)

So how do you get here? First of all, make sure you have an IRC client, such as mIRC if you're on Windows or Colloquy if you're on OS X. (Linux users should be used to fending for themselves.) Then, connect with this info:

Server: irc.dynastynet.net
Channel: #destructoid

Once on, say hello to whoever is on and get to registering your nickname. Choose a nickname with the following command:

/nick YOURNICKHERE

And register for your exclusive use it with this command:

/ns register PASSWORD EMAIL

Note: a few names have been set aside for previous IRC users. If this is the case for you, contact me and I'll sort it out for you.

That's pretty much it. I'd suggest telling your IRC client to auto-connect to irc.dynastynet.net every time you turn it on. Here are some additional start-up commands (in proper order) you'll want to put in your client to auto-execute when you start up the program:

/nick YOURNICKHERE (restores your nickname to what you want your default to be)
/ns identify PASSWORD (identifies yourself to the network, like signing-in, so it doesn't kick you off your own nick)
/join #destructoid (joins the room automatically)

Happy typing!

P.S. IRCartel "members": your cblog banners will be updated soon in order to reflect the change of servers. You don't have to do anything but maybe refresh your cache once it's changed.