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We are glad you found this place in the web. Enjoy your stay.
Official support channel is #lightirc at irc.lightirc.com
What are the features of lightIRC?
lightIRC supports channels, queries, a lot of IRC commands, some CTCP commands and is much customizable through StyleSheets. It has multi language support (currently English, Spanish, German, Turkish, Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Serbian, Estonian, Romanian) and a nice GUI to set kicks, bans and channel modes.
The client uses a socket to connect directly to the IRC server (no XMLSocket, no gateway).
Can I remove the copyright from the client? What about commercial use?
You can embed lightIRC for free in your non-commercial websites or projects. In that case a copyright hint to lightIRC will be shown inside the chatrooms.
A donation (you decide about which amount is appropriate!) is required to remove the copyright notice or to get the permission for using lightIRC in your commercial project. See more details here.
Can you do some changes to lightIRC for me?
Yes, I can. Please contact me and we will figure something out.
I want to connect to <some large network here>. Why is this not working?
Please read the next question. You can only connect to servers that explicitely allow connections! You either have to
• ask the server admin of your favourite IRC network to setup a flash policy daemon (see next question)
• connect to your own IRC network and install a flash policy daemon there.
I am getting a Security Error when trying to connect. How to solve this?
When you can't connect to a server and the client shows a security sandbox violation message, the server the IRCd is running on does not allow connections from a Flash client.
Due to the socket security policy Adobe introduced with Flash Player 9,0,124 you are forced to have a daemon that delivers a crossdomain.xml to allow establishing a connection.
It is not a restriction by lightIRC, but one of Adobe Flash!
The policy daemon must run on the same machine where your IRC server is. It is no client-side solution!
How to solve the problem if your IRC server runs on Linux:
> cd /usr/local (or cd ~)
• Download our prepared flashpolicyd (based on the flashpolicyd project):> wget http://www.lightirc.com/release/flashpolicyd.zip
> unzip flashpolicyd.zip
> cd flashpolicyd
> chmod a+x flashpolicyd.rb
• Make sure you have Ruby installed. If you have not, you can maybe install it with one of the following commands dependent on your Linux distribution or through compiling the Ruby sources:> unzip flashpolicyd.zip
> cd flashpolicyd
> chmod a+x flashpolicyd.rb
> apt-get install ruby
> yum install ruby
• Start flashpolicyd> yum install ruby
> ./flashpolicyd.rb --xml flashpolicy.xml --logfile flashpolicyd.log
• Verify that flashpolicyd is running:
> tail flashpolicyd.log
"Starting server on port xxx in process xxx"
Everything is fine.
"Can't open server: Errno::EACCES Permission denied - bind(2)"
You try to bind port 843 which requires root access. Start the daemon as root or use the following command:
> ./flashpolicyd.rb --xml flashpolicy.xml --logfile flashpolicyd.log --port 8002
Your flashpolicyd is now started as a normal user with a different port. You must pass policyPort=8002 as a parameter to lightIRC.swf when starting flashpolicyd like this!
"Starting server on port xxx in process xxx"
Everything is fine.
"Can't open server: Errno::EACCES Permission denied - bind(2)"
You try to bind port 843 which requires root access. Start the daemon as root or use the following command:
> ./flashpolicyd.rb --xml flashpolicy.xml --logfile flashpolicyd.log --port 8002
Your flashpolicyd is now started as a normal user with a different port. You must pass policyPort=8002 as a parameter to lightIRC.swf when starting flashpolicyd like this!
If you cannot install Ruby, there are some other daemons around:
• Policy server written in Perl
• Policy server written in C
• Policy servers in Perl/Python by Adobe (you should not use them, they don't work reliably)
How to solve the problem if your IRC server runs on Windows:
• Have a look at this policy server written in TCL: Flash socket policy server.
• You can also modify this PHP policy daemon to work on Windows.
What should my flashpolicy.xml look like?
This is a good choice if your IRCd is running on port 6667:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
<allow-access-from domain="*" to-ports="6667" />
</cross-domain-policy>
Customization parameters
You must pass at least one parameter to the SWF (host/server), the others are optional.
Those parameters can either be stored in the index.html of the downloadable package (params.name = "value";) or put into the URL to lightIRC.swf; e.g.: www.lightirc.com/start/lightIRC.swf?host=lightirc.com&nickselect=yes&nickServAuth=yes
| Parameter | Default | Description | Introduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connection | |||
| host | Server IP/hostname | ||
| port | 6667 | Server port | |
| policyPort | 843 | Defines the port where Flash Player should look for crossdomain.xml | 0.9.7 |
| Client settings | |||
| nick | lightIRC_% | The username to connect with. It is also a prefilled value for the nickselect box. Add "%" ("%25" urlencoded) and lightIRC adds a random number to prevent doubles (e.g.: "nick%" -> nick123") | |
| nickselect | no | "yes" or "no". Indicates whether a popup to enter a nickname should be shown before connecting. | |
| pass | Password (only needed on some servers) | ||
| serverPassword | no | "yes" or "no". Indicates whether a window to enter a server password should be shown. | 0.9.3 |
| ident | lightIRC | Ident for the user | 0.9.8 |
| realname | lightIRC.com Flash IRC Client | Real name for the user | 0.9.8 |
| quitmsg | powered by lightIRC.com | Quit message for the user | 0.9.8 |
| nickServAuth | no | "yes" or "no". Show password box when nickselect = "yes". Registers user to NickServ then. | |
| nickServPass | Identifies the user to NickServ with the given password | 0.9.7 | |
| language | en | en, de, fr, es, tr, hu, nl, se, fi, ee, ro, sr_cyr, sr_lat, al, pl, br, gr, it, bg, cat | |
| autojoin | Comma-seperated list of channels to join after a connection is established. E.g.: #lightIRC,#help |
||
| perform | Comma-seperated list of commands to be executed after connecting. E.g.: /mode $me +x |
0.9.6 | |
| soundAlerts | yes | "yes" or "no". Indicates whether a sounds are on (e.g. on hilight or new private message). | 0.9.7 |
| autoReconnect | yes | "yes" or "no". Reconnect if the connection to the server gets interrupted. | 0.9.3 |
| webcam | no | "yes" or "no". Enables webcam feature using a Red5 backend. Only available when using lightirc.com as IRC server. More information | 0.9.6 |
| Customization / Appearance | |||
| styleURL | Add the location of a Flex StyleSheet compiled as SWF to customize the lightIRC client. More information. | ||
| URLTextColor | #0000FF | Text color for links (URLs and channel links inside the chat) as this is not handled by StyleSheets. | |
| buttonTextColor | #333333 | Buttons to navigate between channels/queries: Default color | |
| buttonNewMessageTextColor | #890000 | Color if new message was received | |
| buttonNewInfoTextColor | #6e4646 | Color if a new information message was received (part, quit, ...) | |
| infoLineColor | #fc7f00 | Color code for information messages. | 0.9.6 |
| fontSize | 12 | How large should fonts in text input and chat area be displayed? | 0.9.6 |
| userListWidth | 160 | Any value >= 130 or 0 (disables the user list completely). | 0.9.6 |
| doubleClickForQuery | no | "yes" or "no". Open query when doubleclicking a nick from the user list or show user central when clicking a nick. | 0.9.6 |
| showJoinPartMessages | yes | "yes" or "no". Show join, part and quit messages. | 0.9.7 |
| showTimestamps | yes | "yes" or "no". Show timestamps in front of all received messages and commands. | 0.9.7 |
| chatAreaClickOnUser | select |
Defines the event that should happen when you click on a nickname in front of a message in the chat area. "select": selects the nickname in the user list "central": shows up the user central "query": opens a query with that user |
0.9.7 |
| Buttons | |||
| showServerWindowButton | yes | "yes" or "no" | |
| showRegisterNicknameButton | no | "yes" or "no". Shows a button to register a nickname to NickServ. (Parameter was called nickCentral before) | 0.9.9 |
| showNavigationBar | yes | "yes" or "no". Shows the navigation bar on the top (introduced in lightIRC 0.9.6) | 0.9.6 |
| showActionsButton | no | "yes" or "no". Shows the action combobox in channels to select different features. Will be removed in the next versions! | 0.9.6 |
| showButtonBar | yes | "yes" or "no". Show server, channel and query buttons to navigate between different windows. | 0.9.7 |
| showNickChangeButton | yes | "yes" or "no". Show button to change the nickname. | 0.9.7 |
| showOptionsButton | yes | "yes" or "no". Shows the options button to adjust different settings. | 0.9.7 |
| showListButton | yes | "yes" or "no". Show button to list all channels. | 0.9.7 |
| showRichTextControls | yes | "yes" or "no". Show buttons for text formatting (bold, underline, color) | 0.9.7 |
| showRegisterChannelButton | no | "yes" or "no". Shows up a panel to register a channel to ChanServ. | 0.9.8 |
| showSubmitMessageButton | no | "yes" or "no". Shows a button to submit a typed message. | 0.9.8 |
| showPartChannelButton | yes | "yes" or "no". Hides the leave channel button. | 0.9.8 |
| showChannelCentralButton | yes | "yes" or "no". The channel central gives the user possibility to manage channel modes, bans and the topic. | 0.9.8 |
| showButtonTexts | yes | "yes" or "no". Hides all texts for the buttons in the navigation bar. This is useful if you have limited space where the buttons would overlap each other. | 0.9.8 |
What about skins?
lightIRC supports StyleSheets.
Play around with some styles that work with lightIRC: Brownie, Aeon, Yahoo, BlueTan, Moxy. Take one of those URLs and pass it to the lightIRC SWF through the parameter "styleURL". You can get a preview of them here.
If you don't do so, lightIRC uses the default Adobe Flex style.
Please copy the styles to your server if you want to use them in a production environment.
All those styles are from ScaleNine. They are the property of their creators.
Styles made by lightIRC users:
Darkstyle by Matthew Lee
Butterfly by Souta
VirtuaLife by Bernardo C. R.
Schlumpfi by Schlumpfi
Can I create an own style for lightIRC?
Yes, you can.
To introduce the mechanism lightIRC uses for skins:
You can link different styles to lightIRC using the styleURL parameter.
That URL must refer to a SWF stylesheet. This file includes CSS declarations as well as images. This makes you able to change everything with only one URL.
Creating own styles:
• Download and unzip the Adobe Flex SDK
• Open the Flex Style Explorer
• Change everything you want using the Style Explorer. lightIRC makes use of the components called Button, TextArea, TextInput, List, Panel, VScrollBar, CheckBox, ComboBox, ColorPicker and DataGrid.
• Click "Export All CSS" (bottom left corner) in Style Explorer when you're done.
• Paste the stylesheet data from your clipboard to a new file called style.css
• Open a console window (on Windows: Start - Run - "cmd"), go to your Adobe Flex SDK folder inside the subdirectory bin. Type mxmlc.exe style.css (or wherever your style.css is located)
• A new file called style.swf will be created. You can upload this file to your webspace and link it to lightIRC.
It would be great if you could drop me a mail with your own style so that I can publish it here :-) Thank you.
Can't you add emoticons/smileys to lightIRC?
This question comes up very often and unfortunately there is no good solution to realize this in Flash.
Even if I think emoticons and IRC do not fit together, the main reason is that image rendering between text blocks does not work well in Adobes TextArea component.
There are some workarounds for this and one of those is made by myself, but using it in big applications on verbose channels would cause serious problems.
If some time passes by, maybe there will be a stable implementation for lightIRC somewhen.
What are the service commands for irc.lightirc.com?
The first thing to do is registering your nickname when you are connected to irc.lightirc.com. You can do this by typing the following command in lightIRC:
/ns register password yourmailaddress
If you are done with that, you can proceed with registering your channel:
/cs register #yourchannel
This makes you an owner of #yourchannel. If you reconnect to the network, you must identify yourself to receive the owner status again. You do this by typing:
/id yourpassword
Where yourpassword is the password you used when registering your nickname.If you want to give permanent operator status to other people, you can use this command. Make sure the person has already registered their nickname (step 1):
/cs aop #yourchannel add nickname
Use "del" instead of "add" to remove the permanent operator status from someone.Try typing the following commands to get information about more commands:
/ns help
/cs help
/cs help
Can I get the sourcecode of lightIRC?
No. lightIRC is freeware, that means free for use. The sourcecode is not open.