Alis

Alis (Advanced List Service) is the service IRCnet uses to allow you to search for channels. It is a replacement for the /LIST IRC command.

See the FAQ for information on LIST and why Alis is used instead.

(Trillian and Gaim users should take special care that they read the How does Alis work? -section below too.)

Lists all channels with the channelname containing "help":

Lists all channels with a minimum of 10 users and the word "help" in the topic:

See also FAQ for links to web-based channel listings.

On some IRC clients, SQUERY does not work that easilly by default, then you have to use (notice the colon):

or even (known to work in Trillian and Gaim):

You can get some help on alis with the following command:

A particular usefull command is:

For a full list of command arguments for the alis LIST command:

Alis honours the secret/private ( s and p) channels, we only get to see the visible ones.

As it is right now it is impossible to list more than the first 60 channels that matches a given search (This is fixed in a more recent beta-version, but it is not used on IRCnet.)

There is also a slight issue with case-sensitivity, you can not match against uppercase text in a topic.

IRCnet uses Alis version 2.4.

You can find the Alis service software at http://aliserv.sourceforge.net/

(You do not need to download anything if you just want to use the alis service to list IRCnet channels for you, the service runs on irc servers to provide the list to users)