How do you talk to your friends on FICS and other chess servers? How do you send messages to your opponent, who may be around the world from you? How do you talk to the people watching a game without disturbing the players?

There are a set of commands to let you talk to specific people, groups of people and everybody on the server. Like this:

shout <message>	Send a message to everyone (preceded by: yourHandle shouts)
it <message>	Send a messsage to everyone (preceded by: --> yourHandle)
tell <handle or channel> <message>	Send a message to a particular person or a channel
say <message>	Send a message to your opponent or last opponent
kibitz <message>	Send a message to your opponent and everyone observing your game
whisper <message>	Send a message to the observers of a game, but not the players
Click here to see help files (Note: these help files were downloaded from the FICS server via the mailhelp command — so they may not be up to date — please refer to the help files onsite for the latest information.)

One thing that it is important to remember (and that makes it hard to write about using the chess servers) is that each server varies some from the others, and there are a variety of client-side interfaces. FICS provides links to a group of interfaces: winboard, babaschess, cclient, and others. I'm only familiar with winboard, although I've tried babaschess... ICC mainly uses the blitzen interface, which I used when I had a membership there. I'm not sure about the USCL server, I've never been there.

Some of the client software provides services that the others don't — for instance, babaschess pops up a discussion window when you send a tell to another player, where you don't need to use the tell xx (or .) command before further messages, you can just type what you want to say and the interface sends the message when you hit return. The winboard interface doesn't do that; you type a tell into the interaction window and the reply appears there, mixed with all the other shouts and announcements; to continue a conversation, you need to type tell xx (or .) before the message to send it to the person you were talking to. (If you're talking to a channel, you can use , to send another message to the channel.)

Three commands are only useful when you're playing a game, say, whisper and kibitz. Say works like a tell, but to your opponent; kibitz talks to everyone who'se observing your game, including your opponent — useful when a group of people watch a tournament game, for instance; whisper is like a kibitz, but only to the observers. A player can use the whisper command, to send comments that his opponent won't see. It's actually interesting to be an observer when both players are using whispers to talk to the observers — they may or may not be thinking the same things as they play.

It is, of course, a matter of chess manners not to distract people while they are playing, nor of course not to comment on specific moves to the players during a game — although you can, of course, use a tell to say anything you like, secretly, to a player.