Chat
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Opera has an elegant, integrated chat client with essential features:
- Simultaneous connection to any number of chat servers
- Private person-to-person chat
- Group conversations in rooms
- Integration with Opera's contact manager
Getting started
To connect to a room for the first time:
- Go to
- Click "New", select "Chat account".
- Fill in your real name and e-mail address (or something else if you want more privacy).
- Enter the nickname as you would like it to appear in the chat. This is restricted to 9 characters on some servers.
- Choose a chat server to connect to.
- Click "Finish" to create the account.
When you have set up a chat account, the list of available rooms is automatically downloaded from the server and displayed.
Joining rooms
Select
on the menu to get the list of rooms on a chat server.- Type in the "Quick find" field to find particular rooms
- Click the coloumn headers to sort the room list accordingly
- Double-click a room to join it
- Click to enter a room that does not appear in the list
Room chat
When you join a room, a chat page is displayed. Notice the following details:
- The main part of the page contains the communication between the people in the room
- The number of people and the topic for the room are displayed at the top
- The field at the bottom of the page is for writing your own messages
- Colors are used to distinguish different sorts of messages
The list of people in the room is on the right-hand side. People who's nicknames are bolded, have special permissions in the chat room and are known as operators. People with ghosted icons are not in your contact list.
Write a message in the field at the bottom of the page to say something to the room.
Note: If there are many users on a chat server, it can take some time before messages are delivered.
Chat status
If you are talking on the phone or have to leave your desk for a while, let other users know by changing your on-line status in the chat menu.
More chat room actions
While in a room, you can also:
- Right-click a nick in the right-hand list to
- Get "whois" information about the person
- Save and edit contact information for the person
- Start a private chat with the person
- Send the person an e-mail message if you have the address
- Send the person a file
- Click to change your nick
- Catch someone's attention by starting a message with their nick. Type the first letters of the nick and press Tab to auto-complete. This will highlight the message on the person's screen in most chat clients.
- Type "/me" to initiate a spoken "action" in the chat room, for example "/me sings". Spoken actions will appear in magenta.
Private chat
Double-clicking a nick will also initiate a private chat. When chatting privately, a small toolbar is displayed with the same options as the right-click menu of the nickname list.
When someone sends you a private message to start a chat, you will see a new page popping up with the person's nick on the page tab.
Chat room commands
There are toolbar buttons and menu choices available for most of your chat command needs, but if you prefer to type commands, you can use standard IRC commands while chatting in Opera. These are some of the most frequently used commands:
- /j or /join [name of room] to join a particular chat room.
- /msg [nickname] [message] to send a private message to another user.
- /nick [nickname] to change your own nickname.
- /whois [nickname] to get more information about a user.
- /invite [nickname] [name of room] to invite a user to your chat room.
- /part [name of room] to leave a particular room.
- /quit to disconnect from chat.
Smileys
Several combinations of characters will produce graphical smileys when used in a chat session or an e-mail message:
Smiley | Characters | Description |
---|---|---|
|
Happy face | |
|
Unhappy face | |
|
Winking face | |
|
Surprised face | |
|
Grinning face | |
|
Cool face | |
|
Indifferent face | |
:'( | Crying face | |
|
Angry face | |
|
Face sticking tongue out | |
'< | Pacman |
Creating rooms
To create your own room and become operator, select
on the menu and enter the name of the room you wish to create.You need to pick a room that has not already been created, so you may have to try a few names before you find one that is available. If a room with the name you chose is already created, you will just join the room as a normal user.
In some rooms, only operators may change the room's topic, visibility in room lists, and password protection. Click "Properties" on the toolbar to see if you are allowed to change any of these.
Room operator
When you create a new room, you automatically become operator of the room. When right-clicking a nick in the list, operators get a "Control" sub-menu that lets them:
- Grant and take away operator status
- Allow or deny people to talk in the room ("voice")
- Kick misbehaving people from the channel
Chat panel
All rooms you join are saved in the Chat panel, organized under the chat server they belong to. Click the name of a previously visited room to join.
You will also see a list of all contacts that are logged on to the same server, provided you have added their chat nicks to their contact information. Click a contact to start a private chat.
Account properties
Go to
to fine-tune your account settings, such as:- Chat server port number (default is 6667)
- Secure connection (required by some chat servers)
- Encoding for international characters (if you see weird characters, ask other people for the correct value to use for your language)
Note that you can set up as many accounts as you like, which allows you to connect to multiple chat servers simultaneously.
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