Transhumanist Chat

The Transhumanist chat room—#transhumanism on the freenode server, port 6667—is a place for people interested in transhumanism to hang out. As a general rule, the chat room is informal. Friendly chat is not only permitted, but encouraged. The #transhumanism room is sometimes newbie-friendly. (Sometimes.) However, we make no guarantee that the helpful person answering your questions is an experienced transhumanist, as opposed to someone who wandered in from a different chatroom and thinks the Singularity is a kind of fish.

Etiquette

• Although #transhumanism doesn't need to stick to transhumanist topics, it is the policy of #transhumanism not to have certain kinds of discussions that appear on other IRC channels. In particular, #transhumanism does not allow discussion of l33t w4r3z, sex jokes, or other "pack of junior males" behavior.
• Please speak like a civilized human being. L33t sp33k, excessive use of smilies and vapid acronyms, and other forms of degenerate communication will not be met with approval (unless used in tasteful humor). We will, however, do our best to accomodate non-native English speakers.
• If someone brings in a person new to transhumanist issues for an introduction, please don't interrupt the conversation with that person unless you have something relevant to say, or unless the newcomer seems to be looking for random friendly chat.
• Don't be offended if you ask a factual question and the answer is "Google". Unlike other IRC channels, we give you enough credit to be able to perform a simple Web search.
• Just start talking. If you keep saying "hi" and no one is responding, it's because "hi" isn't a very interesting topic. If you want to talk about something, start talking about it and see if anyone responds. Most people in #transhumanism keep an eye on the channel while they work on other things and will return to chat if they have the time and interest.
• No bots. One need only recall the time google-bot visisted to understand how quickly a bot can destory the channel.
• The #transhumanism channel is not logged.  This is a matter of deliberate policy; please do not put logs of #transhumanism online! Some individuals may keep private logs and may be willing to share.

Connecting

You may see a message that says "The application's digital signature cannot be verified" when the applet first loads.  This is normal.   You will need to allow the java application to run in order to connect to the chatroom.

Note that #transhumanism runs on the same machine as several other organizations, whose chat rooms will also appear if you connect to freenode as your IRC server. These other organizations and their chat rooms are not affiliated with the Transhumanist Forums, or the Transhumanist Wiki. (Although there is considerable overlap between the people who hang out in, for example, #cosmeng, #hplusroadmap, #lesswrong, and #transhumanism.)

To join one of these other chatrooms, use the /join command. For example, to join the #hplusroadmap channel, you would enter "/join #hplusroadmap" in the chat window.

You can connect to #transhumanism using any IRC client (see a partial list of IRC clients by environment). The following applet should also let you connect to #transhumanism directly if you are using a Java-enabled browser: