http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=310841

I spent several hours piecing together a telnet client for the chatterbox. When you first connect, you will initially be known as 'AnonyMonk', which (obviously) has restricted use. As AnonyMonk, you may watch the public chatterbox content scroll by. If you so desire, you may authenticate yourself to gain additional functionality. After a successfull authentication, any text entered that does not begin with a colon (':') will be taken to be text to send to the chatterbox as is (so typing "foobar" will send "foobar" to the public chatterbox, while "/msg foo bar" will send the text "bar" to user "foo"). Note that in public chatterbox mode (the default mode upon logging in), all commands are prepeded with a colon (':') to differentiate them from text meant to be sent directly to the chatterbox.

Upon authentication, you also gain access to the 'inbox mode'. Typing ':inbox' will detach you from the public chatterbox mode and enter you into a mode where you can read, reply to, delete and archive private messages. I kept the inbox mode as simple as I could think to keep it. It provides you with a list of users who's message(s) you have in your Message Inbox (archived messages excluded for a very good reason, along with the message count for each user. You select one user at a time and their messages are presented one at a time. After a message is presented, valid options are "reply", "save", "archive", or "delete". All changes (deleting and/or archiving) you make are not immediately made (makes things faster as well as keeping hit load to perlmonks.org lower). When you 'exit/quit' the inbox mode, you will be asked if you want to make the changes permanent.

This telnet chatterbox client comes with color! Usernames are colored cyan, chatterbox actions ("/me"'s) are colored green, and <code> blocks are posted with a blue background (to highlight them). Also, text wrapping is done on 79 characters to make for bearable reading :)

So now, the only piece of information I haven't mentioned yet. Where to connect to use the telnet cb client! telnet perlmonk.org 8040 is the place to go. Be aware that windows telnet does not work with this script beyond anonymous chatterbox viewing (it randomly strips characters out of strings passed to the server, so even getting an ':auth' command through is a miracle).

Send comments, suggestions and/or hate mail to '/msg Coruscate' or to the email address listed on the third line when you connect to the telnet cb client.