Chat Room Etiquette

Helpful Tips:

1. Don’t give out any personal information like telephone number, home address, school name or parent’s office address.
2. Use any name, other than your real one as your log-on name.
3. Sometimes you may meet a friend online and discover that you both live in the same city. Do not start setting up meetings or telephonic conversations without your parent’s supervision! If you are talking on phone, make sure you have blocked your caller ID so that the other person cannot track you.
4. Stay cool and calm when you think that someone is getting rude or is causing trouble.
5. Learn how to use ‘smileys’ to show how you are feeling.
6. Since you can’t see or even hear the person you are chatting with, it would be easy for someone to fool you (You know that because you too can do it, right?). Someone can even use your log on name and pretend that it is you. Your friends will think it is ‘the real you’ by just asking some questions only known to you and your friend.
7. How to stay cool when someone is rude?
8. Ignore the person completely. Don’t even speak about that person to others in the room. Don’t send rude messages back to the person unless you are ready for a flame war! Remember, they want your attention. Don’t give it to them.
9. Report the incident in writing to the administrator of the chat room. Tell him what the problem is, which room you are in, what day and time, what his/her name is, and any other details you feel are important. If you are specific with all these details, it will be easy for you to find relevant information about the person.
10. Don’t give them the pleasure of knowing that you are upset due to them. Remember, they want your attention. But fortunately trouble-makers are a sad minority. Don’t let them spoil your fun!
11. You can always just log-off and do something else. It’s your keyboard and you have the control over it. Just calmly exit from the chat room.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Safety:

Internet Relay Chat is a method of communication in real time over the Internet. When you type something on the window it gets immediately posted to the rest of the people currently tuned in to your channel of conversation. IRC will never be a safe place to chat programmes among net-heads. It will be hard to totally prevent a user from using it. So what is the goal? We need to empower users in Internet safety education. The most important thing is to take permission from your parents or guardian before downloading or using IRC.