Many things mention about other services are still possible with IRC; in some cases by the client side and in some cases by the server side. Server side logging

Many things mention about other services are still possible with IRC; in some cases by the client side and in some cases by the server side. Server side logging is possible (and I have implemented this once) with IRC. Still, you can make it available with multiple protocols, and you can alter an implementation of a IRC server even if you do not have it available with other protocols too. IRC is also easy to use without any special software. I currently have a NNTP server set up, but not IRC or any other kind of chat system (but if I do set one up, it will almost certainly be IRC).