What is ViRC? Visual IRC is a brand new "next-generation" IRC client for Windows, written by MeGALiTH (Adrian Cable). It incorporates many advanced features, including: Full attribute support - put bold, italic and underline text in the channel, similar to ircII for UNIX. Different types of channel events are displayed in different colours. For example, channel text appears in black, topic changes appear in blue, mode changes appear in green, private messages appear in orange, and so on. Hyperlink support - when someone types a URL into the channel, ViRC will highlight it in green. Just click on it, and your Web browser will be pointed to that URL. As many as 32 different Web browsers may be defined for use with the feature, and as long as the browser supports DDE (which most do), you'll be able to use this feature with that browser. ViRC comes preconfigured with the appropriate DDE settings for Netscape, Enhanced Mosaic, and Cello. Fully customizable - everything, including the colours, fonts and styles of text, can be changed. Change the channel text font to Wingdings and see what it looks like! Full context-sensitive online help. Contains many sections detailing all aspects of the program, including a complete, comprehensive IRC command reference. TDCC protocol - up to 3 times faster than regular DCC. TDCC can be used for file transfers or for real-time audio connections. New in 0.83, a transfer rate indicator, updated every 2 seconds, shows how fast your DCC and TDCC transfers are going. Audio chat support, similar to IPhone. Start a real-time conversation with another ViRC user, where you speak instead of type to them! All sound compression formats that are installed in your system are supported. The sample rate, data rate and so on are all fully adjustable to get the maximum performance out of your system. XDCC support - offer files or packs of files, which people can request automatically. Turn yourself into the IRC equivalent of an FTP site!! Group list - "surf" the list of channels that are available. Look at the topics and users on the channel before joining!! Now enhanced with a filtering capability. Userlist support - turn yourself into a bot. Add entries to your userlist to give people access to functions, such as auto-op on join, or add them to your banlist to make ViRC kick and ban them when they join. Now enhanced substantially, and can load UNIX Vladbot userlists. LagScope(tm) - find out how much you're lagged at a glance!! Now moved to the toolbar to take up less space. Channel logging - start and stop a channel log with a click of the mouse. Include what events you wish to log, and select whether to generate authentication signatures. Logs generated with authentication signatures can be loaded back into ViRC to see if they have been tampered with. Pause & resume - pause all channel text windows or each DCC chat window individually to cut and paste without having the problem of more text appearing. Command-line recall buffer - the last 100 lines of text you've typed in each window is stored in a buffer. To scroll through the buffer, just press the up and down arrow cursor keys. A separate buffer is maintained for each open window. Multiport support - now you're not just limited to port 6667 of the server any more!! Connect to any port you wish for faster access or different server features. Aliases and macros - create your own IRC commands, or create aliases for commonly-used sequences of commands and text. Attach them to a menu with the macros feature. The format of aliases and macros entered is designed to be 100% compatible with ircII scripts. Event editor - totally alter the way ViRC works. Create or modify events that are fired when server replies, CTCPs or CTCP replies are received. Change the text displayed, where it's put, and the colour and logtype. Attach multimedia files (WAV/MID/AVI) and custom code to events defined in the event editor. Now extended, with 8 event tabs instead of just 3 for even greater flexibility. Full multimedia support - add sound effects, MIDI files, video, and synthesized speech to the IRC experience!! Built in UNIX tools - including IDENTD server, finger server, finger client and DNS lookup function. More customizable options - auto-rejoin when kicked from channel, auto-reconnect on server disconnection, and much, much more. New graphical toolbar - more compact and easier to use than in previous versions. Network support - install one copy of ViRC and use many sets of configuration files. Perfect if you use ViRC on a network and want each user to have their own configuration!! DCC/TDCC resume - resume those interrupted file transfers!! Import Vladbot userlists - share listset files with UNIX's most popular IRC bot. DCC Whiteboard - this unique new feature is effectively an object-oriented paint package that works between two people over a DCC Chat connection. Both people can draw and place text on the whiteboard surface. Perfect for exchange of ideas ... a picture is worth a thousand words. Soon you'll be able to drop user-defined objects, such as files, onto the whiteboard too. Notify list - get automagically informed whenever your friends join or leave IRC. Ignore list - get troubled by your enemies no more. Advanced flood protection - probably the most sophisticated flood protection ever seen in an IRC client. Fully configurable. Configurable toolbar - the large, clunky toolbar in previous versions of ViRC has now been replaced with a smaller, more compact toolbar that is fully configurable. Attach scripts to any buttons, define up to 15 custom buttons of your own, complete with tooltips, or even turn the toolbar off entirely if you're running in a low-resolution video mode. Query window - now you have the choice of either having all private messages appear in the channel windows (as previously) or having each user have a separate window of their own for messages. ViRC Programming Language - surely the most important new feature ever, VPL provides a complete programming language to do things in, similar to ircII, but extending it in some areas. No other IRC client comes close. For full information on VPL, see VPL.TXT included with ViRC, which is nearly 1000 lines long. Now includes IRC Primer - a comprehensive yet easy-to-understand document detailing what IRC is, how it works, and an introduction to its core features and commands. Perfect for people new to the world of IRC. It's looking good!! ViRC sounds amazing! How can I get hold of a copy? The release version of ViRC will not be out for some time, as it is in a very early stage of development at present. However, if you wish to beta test ViRC, you may do so, providing you report all the bugs you find to me. The latest build at this time is 0.90alpha4.