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MSN Chat Information

Hopefully some of you can find some use for all of this. Those of you using IRC Dominator, Viper, or any of the other bots, may or may not find this page of much use. Also, some of the info is really only useful to scripters or people writing clients that work with MSN. Basically, if you can use this info, good. If not, you might still find it an interesting read, if you're into this kind of stuff.


Download Vincula for mIRC: Do stuff on MSN Chat: Download MSN Chat controls:

MSN Chat commands

The MSN Chat Control has some /commands available to it, similar to the ones that mIRC and other chat clients have. It doesn't have nearly as many, but some of the ones it does have can be useful.

The ACCESS command

Every room on MSN has its own Access List. This list is used to manage who can and cannot enter the room, as well as those who are automatically unspecced upon entry, and those who are automatically made hosts and owners. It can be modified at any time by a Host, Owner, or an MSN employee.

The Access List includes five types of entries: DENY, GRANT, VOICE, HOST, and OWNER.

To modify the access list in mIRC, you have to use the /access command. If you are using Vincula 3.5 or newer, typing /access will open a access list dialog to let you easily edit the list. Of course, not everyone uses Vincula. For those of you that don't, you will likely have to use the normal /access command.

To make good use of the access list, you need to understand Hostmasks:

Everyone on MSN has a unique identifier attached to them. I'm not sure what the official name would be, but myself and many other people call it the person's Gatekeeper ID, or just gate for short. This ID number looks something like this (no, this is not my real Gatekeeper ID):

eXonyte!69805504EE6CFAEA@GateKeeperPassport

This sad excuse for identification is what MSN gives our clients instead of an IP address or a hostname. Thank you MSN... Either way, when adding an entry to the access list, you need to use the person's gate in one of a few ways. You can either use the entire thing, which is fine for most cases, such as adding hosts and owners, or you can use the wildcards * and ? to make it a bit more useful, especially for DENY entries. The basic idea is that * means "anything", and ? means "any single character".

To add me as an owner in your room, no matter what name I use:

/access %#roomname add owner *!69805504EE6CFAEA@*

Or perhaps you think Vincula sucks and don't anyone with my name in your room for the next 15 minutes:

/access %#roomname add deny *eXonyte*!*@* 15

Maybe there's some lamer using a bot to flood your room, and the bot always uses the same Guest_ name, but with a two digit number added on:

/access %#roomname add deny >FloodBot??!*@*

In general, the format of the /access command is:

/access [room] [cmd] [type] [host] [time] :[reason]

The commands you can perform on the list are ADD, DELETE, LIST, and CLEAR. They are all self explanatory, so I'll leave it at that.

The MODE command

Modes are used to control all sorts of different settings, either on yourself, on the chatroom, or on other people in the chatroom. If a mode gets set as +mode then that means the mode is active. If it is -mode, then the mode is no longer active.

To change a mode in mIRC, you can type this for modes which don't require extra information, such as modes b and i: 
/mode %#roomname mode
For a mode that needs more information, like modes l and k 
/mode %#roomname mode ExtraInfo
To change a user mode such as o or q (notice this is the same as l and k above): 
/mode %#roomname mode TargetName
To change a self mode: 
/mode YourName mode
In all of these commands, instead of "mode" you need to type either +mode or -mode, to turn the mode on or off. For example, to set a room to mode i (invite only), I would type this: 
/mode %#roomname +i
Or to make Doodles a host, I would type this: 
/mode %#roomname +o Doodles
Channel Modes:
User Modes:
Self Modes:

The PROP command, for rooms

The room properties are where certain bits of information about a room are stored. Things such as passwords, and even the language and category information are stored as PROP entries.

A room property can be read by typing: 
/prop %#roomname property
A property can be set by typing: 
/prop %#roomname property value
For values with spaces in them, such as for the topic, onjoin, and onpart properties: 
/prop %#roomname property :value
To get a list of some of the properties in a room, you can type: 
/prop %#roomname *
The available properties are:
The languages supported for the LANGUAGE property are as follows:
  1. English
  2. French
  3. German
  4. Japanese
  5. Swedish
  6. Dutch
  7. Korean
  8. Chinese (Simplified)
  9. Portuguese
  10. Finnish
  11. Danish
  12. Russian
  13. Italian
  14. Norwegian
  15. Chinese (Traditional)
  16. Spanish
  17. Czech
  18. Greek
  19. Hungarian
  20. Polish
  21. Slovene
  22. Turkish
  23. Slovak
  24. Portuguese (Brazilian)
The categories that a room may be listed as are:

The PROP command, for users

There are also a few PROPs that are for users. They can be set or checked the same as a room property, except by substituting the user's nickname in place of the %#roomname in the /prop command.

The user properties are:

Profile Icon codes

With MSN Chat 4.2 came these ugly grey profile icons. After a few days they activated, and now they indicate whether the user has a profile, is a guy or a girl, and has a picture. This is handled by a special code in the raw JOIN messages and the raw 353 (/names reply). You can find this code in a JOIN by using $gettok($3,3,44) in mIRC. To find it in a /names reply you need to apply the same $gettok($N,3,44), where $N is no less than $6 and is one of the names in the specific message. You can also get or set the icon by using the MSNPROFILE Property. I won't go into more detail than that though, this page wasn't meant to teach MSN IRCX raws.

The profile icon codes are:

Font Formatting codes

MSN Chat allows you to use any font that you have installed, and one of 16 different colors for your messages to the room, and people in the room.

The format of a normal message on MSN Chat, in mIRC terms, is like this: 
[1]S [color][style]Font;[script] Message[1]

The [1]'s are both $chr(1), which means that this is actually a /ctcp message. The S just signifies that this is a message that contains Font/Style/Color information.

The color codes are usually a single character that indicates the color to be used. Because ASCII characters 10 and 13 are Linefeed and Carriage Return, and are used in the IRC protocol already, they are represented by \n and \r in this chart.

The MSN color codes are as follows:

The style code is a single "bit map" character that tells MSN Chat to display the font either normal, bold, italic, underlined, or any combination of the three.

The style codes are: Or, for a little bit more efficient way of doing it, you can set it up so that you start with the number 1, and then:
For Bold, add 1
For Italic, add 2
For Underline, add 4
Then stick the final number in $chr() and you'll end up with the proper code.

The font name is simply the name of the font, except with spaces replaced by \b which can easily be done by $replace(Font name,$chr(32),\b) in mIRC.

The [script] after the ; is the Script number. It has to do with the language that you're typing in, and how peoples' computers will handle the text. For example, if you want to use the font Wingdings and have it actually display the codes, you will need to use Script number 2, otherwise other people's computers will just show normal typing instead of Wingding symbols.

The Script numbers that I know of are:

Feature Param codes

Just like with the font style code, this is a bit-mapped value, which means you can get the correct number as follows:
Start with 0
To disable the Whisper Window, add 1
To hide the Guest_ on nicknames, add 2
To disable the View Profiles option, add 4
To hide the Room Name, add 8
The resulting number will be what you need to use for the Feature param.

Numbers compliments of Ziggy.

ChatMode Param codes

Numbers compliments of Ziggy.

The GateKeeper Auth Process

This text is a work in progress. It will be revised as needed.
MSN Chat uses an authentication method in order to keep out normal IRC clients. This auth method is known as GateKeeper for guest connections, and GateKeeperPassport when connecting using a passport.

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