That's right! Now go flip someone off

Here are the codes for hidden icons:

(finger)
(mooning)
(drunk)
(smoking)
(fubar)
(swear)

And also not so naughty:

(bandit)
(toivo)
(rock)
(headbang)
(bug)
(poolparty)
(tmi)
(heidy)
(myspace)

Connecting to IRC with Pidgin (Gaim) is very easy! The drawback is that it opens MANY windows on connect (a window for each notice message), but you can close them. Once you are connected, it looks pretty good! Let's test it out and connect to irc.ablenet.org

1. Open main Pidgin window, select Accounts from the top menu, and then click Add/Edit.

2. The new window will pop-up, with all the accounts you added. Click Add button in the bottom, yet another window will pop-up.

3. Select Protocol: IRC from the drop down menu. Enter your name in Screen Name field. Put your server into Server field (in our case irc.ablenet.org). Ignore Password and Local alias fields.

It should look like this:




4. Now go to the Advanced tab. You can change port and encoding if needed, but usually the default value works well. Enter your Username, and put something under Real Name. Click Save.

5. After you click save, Pidgin will connect you to the IRC Network. Additional windows might open if the server sends you any notices. Look for main server window.

In our case:




6. Now you can use standard IRC commands, such as /join or /list. Type /join #ablenet to join main AbleNET channel. A new window or (tab if you use tabbed windows) will appear. Tabbed windows would work better with IRC.

Here is how it looks:



Now you can chat! Don't forget that many of the people won't see Icons you are using for smiles.

Good luck!

L2eXtreme was a great but illegal Lineage server with high rates (7x, 35x), a lot of users and nice Dusk Weapons. Then on November 2006 it got shut down by FBI, which seems like it never happened before (Sadly just as I passed my subclass quest!). For awhile there were talks on either it really was FBI to shut them down or not.. and though some things looked weird, it seems like they really were.

However, a few months ago, L2eXtreme came back. On a different domain and just with 2 servers (one 7x, one 35x), they decided it was of no use to recover old user base. It was a total wipe and you had to start all over, which of course made many people unhappy. They had also removed the Dusk Weapons, and some other things were different from what it was like before. But users got back to L2eXtreme (L2xReborn) and were starting to enjoy the game (though from my own experience the server was down most of the time I tried to play)

L2xReborn promised to bring all old servers back with their settings.. but then they changed their minds. Now the domain redirects to GameHaze, and you can see the following message if you scroll down:


So I guess L2eXtreme is really dead now, after all. Farewell.

Tribute to L2x

Creating custom smiley themes for Pidgin is easy. The drawback is that you are the only one who will see them, unless you force your friends to use the same pack! But first you need to make that pack so let's do it..

1. Make smileys, collect smileys, put them all in one folder! Name the folder the way you will name your smile pack, like my_custom_smileys

2. Inside your newly created folder with smileys, create a blank text file, name it theme and remove the extension. So it will be a file without an extension. To remove an extension you need to be able to see it. If you don't and you are on windows, in your folder menu go to Tools > Folder Options. The box will appear, click View tab and un-check Hide extensions for known file types option then click Ok.

3. Open your newly created theme file in text editor (Right click > Open > Select Notepad from the list, or another text editor of your choice)

4. Add the following text to your file:


Icon will show on the list with other smiley themes when installed in Pidgin, next to the name, description and author information.

5. Now make a list of icons with the text they would appear instead of:


Take each one of your smileys name (with extension), write it down, and then put a code for the smiley next to it. Use tab to separate smiley code from smiley file name, and use a space between the smiley codes if there is more than one.

6. If you want to create separate smileys for MSN or AIM messengers, you can do that too! You only need to make a list of icons you want to use for say msn, and put a [MSN] before it, like:


The protocols are: AIM - [AIM]; ICQ - [ICQ]; Yahoo - [Yahoo] or [Yahoo!] (unsure); XMPP (including Google Talk) - [XMPP], the [default] pack will work on all of them the same way.

7. Now save changes in your theme file. It should look like:


8. Now you need to tar.gz your smiley pack folder, so that other people could download and install it. This task is easy if you are on Linux, however if you are using windows, you will have to get some additional program for that.

I recommend this little program: TAR.GZ File Compression for Windows. It is very easy to use, download the ezGZ program, unzip and click ezgz.exe, select the compression, then simply drag and drop your smiley theme folder on the program window and click Yes. Now enter the name of the archive and Save.

9. Test your smiley pack before sending it out to your friends! You can find instructions for theme installation here:
AbleNET Smiley Theme Pack for Pidgin (Gaim) with Instalation Instructions

If you did everything right, it will work! Now go share your smiley theme with the world!

Good luck!