How do you connect to IRC using telnet?

[Skunk]

Ferg and/or Wazzoo showed me this trick ages abo but I can't remember how you do it. If you fire up a telnet client you can log onto an IRC server and mess around with IRC using the raw protocol - unfortunately I've forgotten the exact steps needed to log on in the first place (you need to send back an ident request and do one or two other things as well). I need this information for my fledgling IRC bot, so any help would be most welcome ;)

[Skunk]

Got it working now - for anyone who wants to know:

Telnet to irc.gameplay.com port 6667 (or whatever)
Type the following hitting enter after each line:

USER A A A A
NICK SkunkBot

The server will then send you a PING message with a number. Reply with the following:

PONG :xxxxxxxxxxx (replacing xxxxx with the number it pinged with)

Hit enter and you'll be on - the MOTD will come splurging past and so forth. You can then join a channel with:

JOIN #wpphp

And say stuff in a channel (send messages) with:

PRIVMSG #wpphp :What you want to say

I'm slowly working my way through the mammoth IRC protocol (it's not too complex until you realise that stuff like /me is done using CTCP, and CTCP is one mean thing to figure out) - so far I've got my Python bot to join a channel and say whatever I type in it's console window - next step is to get it to recognise a few incoming messages etc.

[Godin]

lets seee, from my vast knowing of irc protocol (rofl) heres how to do an emote (via a unix system (such as you'd telnet into) at least)

PRIVMSG #channel :\001ACTION does an emote\001


which would do an emote, eg:

Godin does an emote

would be displayed in irc clients :)