IRC is a classic protocol for online chatting. As such, there has been a lot of people using it over the years, some of which don’t agree with each other. As such some users have pranked others by fooling them into executing undesired commands.
Some examples of commands include tempting people to join the channel zero. This is an obscure feature of the IRC protocol and means to part from all the channels. This is often hidden by exploiting the fact that the join command can join several channels at the same time when they are separated by a comma and that servers frequently treat several zeros the same as just one. This leads to bogus channel names like #1,000.
Another common prank is asking a question about two people on a boat:
Two people are on a boat, /part and /quit. /part fell overboard, who is left in the boat?
This suggests people to enter the command to quit their IRC client when trying to answer. The fact that it is commonly possible to bypass the command parsing and send the correct answer is sometimes used to show that it is safe to answer the question.