Disruptive Telephony

Many folks who are new to using Skype for group chat may not be aware that Skype brings along some of the commands that are popular in IRC chat systems - and the general "/" style of commands used in IRC. To see the list of commands, simply go into any Skype chat (it could even be a chat with only one other person) and type the following command:

/help

This will work on old and new versions of Skype and will give you a list of what commands are available:

Available commands:
/add [skypename]
/help
/topic [new topic]
/me
/history
/leave
/goadmin
/get creator
/get role
/whois [skypename]
/setrole [skypename] MASTER|HELPER|USER|LISTENER
/kick [skypename]
/kickban [skypename]
/get guidelines
/set guidelines [text]
/get options [text]
/set options [[+|-]flag] ...
/setpassword [password] [password hint]
/clearpassword
/get password_hint
/set password_hint [text]
/set password [text]
/get banlist
/get allowlist
/set banlist [[+|-]mask] ...
/set allowlist [[+|-]mask] ...
/alertson [text to match]
/alertsoff
/call [skypename[,skypename,...]]

You simply type any of these commands into a chat and, assuming you have permission to run the command, the action will occur. The full list of commands and options is available at this URL:

http://www.skype.com/go/help.chathelp

If you are the administrator of a chat, you have access to the full list of commands. You are an admin if you either are the original creator or a chat - or were promoted to an admin by another admin using the /setrole command.

I personally use "/me" a good bit to attempt to add emotion into a text chat (ex. "/me laughs"). I also use /alertson and /alertsoff quite a bit to change whether or not I am notified of new messages in a chat. (I'll note that the recent Skype clients also have a GUI way to do this typically through a menu choice of "Chat Notification Settings...".)

I also administer a number of chats and so use /setrole to give others admin privileges and also /kick and /kickban to remove people from chats.

There are also a few other commands that aren't listed (try /info), but this list has most of the ones I'm aware of.

Anyway, try out these commands... they may help you work more quickly with Skype chats!

P.S. Users of Skype 5.0 have an additional command, "/golive", that I described in an earlier post and that provides a simple way to launch conference calls.

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