IRC daemons are not used for chat. Obviously they are used by trojans and other malware to spread their payloads but a IRC server could potentially be used to share templates etc. Just make sure you are running an antivirus program. One of the goals of running EHRs is that you can potentially share community health data ... so one can aggregate the data to spot trends like Sars and swine flu epidemics/pandemics. So, for instance, when you make a diagnosis, you might want to opt to send de-identified data on that diagnosis to a central server for monitoring population health. I can think of lots of uses ...
Here is a concise but extensive list of IRC commands on Wikipedia. Most commands have to be proceeded by a forward slash, so the structure is "/ <command>". Aware of IRC for years, never used it before.
Here's a summary of the few commands supported in this console client: /part #group-name - leave the group eg. /part #synapse will leave the #synapse channel .. you will then be invisible /join #name - eg. /join #synapse ( done automatically when you start the client ) /msg <name>. a private message - sends a private message to the <name> person /away <reason> - set yourself in the away mode and with a full irc client they can see for what reason /away - rescind the /away /names #channel - eg. /names #synapse will show you who is logged into the #synapse channel /list - shows you all the active channels and how many people are on them
