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Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down

myu701 6y ago
So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
- Operyl 6y ago
  Having used IRC, not that big of a deal in my opinion. Most channels run their own log archives, and you always have your own.
- ryanong 6y ago
  IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server. There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.
  - barkingcat 6y ago
    yah, but this particular service, which is a logging server run by an individual, isn't really all that significant in the grand scheme of things.
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    If Freenode was shutting down it would be closer to "gmail is shutting down" IMHO.
    - maccard 6y ago
      According to another comment in this thread, Freenode has 90k CCU, with hundreds of thousands over a period of a few months. The best number I can find for gmail is here [0], which shows Gmail had 72 million active users on android 6 years ago. Sorry to say but Freenode shutting down wouldn't even be a blip compared to gmail shutting down [0] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2014/tops-of-2014-digital/ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2014/tops-of-...
      - heinrich5991 6y ago
        I believe it was meant in proportion to the size of email vs IRC. > Sorry to say but Please just drop that prefix.
        ghostpepper 6y ago
        The scale requested was actually: > On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?
  - abstractbeliefs 6y ago
    Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      I think this would be useful: how many unique users have sent at least one message in the last 24 hours? I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day. There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-related webdev Discord servers that that each have at least 100 unique users interacting daily. I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just echoes in the system, autoreconnecting from old hardware long after their owners have moved on. In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing great!" But frankly I don't think people realize how much IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has been eaten and it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging people who once used it in its prime.
      - dhodell 6y ago
        Many IRC communities have shrunk. Different reasons. Things like Discord and mumble, combined with more collaboration and multiplayer competition in games took gamers away from IRC and crippled networks like Gamesurge. Social media, especially things like Twitter and the various short video sharing services took away the "general chat" demographic -- partially because folks who were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel closer, and folks who are not tend to be younger, and the younger demographic trends towards newer technologies. Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as you point out this isn't always the case. I would argue that freenode is probably safe from too much decline for a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit harsh :)) also tend to be people with a lot of experience in $technical_topic. If you want to ask questions about $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on IRC, that's where you go. You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is not on IRC. Javascript is a relatively new technology (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer, and Elm newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability to run native applications written in JS has caused that community to surge. It's also relatively easier to get into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So you attract more people, and you're going to attract younger people, and you're going to have a really diverse audience for a wide range of topics. All of a sudden a single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem like fun, so you decide to use Discord or Slack. I think this makes a lot of sense for lots of communities. For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical communities, IRC is still a good solution. It's not fair to say that "its lunch has been eaten" -- it'll remain relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most accessible way to communicate. But there are other, different solutions for similar problems that do a better job of catering to specific audiences. And that's just fine. Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts from server stats, which are mostly aggregates. So I can't answer that question. But Freenode's a rather active network.
  - neilv 6y ago
    Agreed. Freenode was (and should still be, IMHO) the go-to real-time chat for open source projects. I didn't realize how important at the time it was being founded. Rob Levin was an online acquaintance, and one day he started asking about how to fund an open source community service with donations. I was interested in open source and non-profits, so he and I talked a bit about that, but I didn't volunteer to help. Next thing I knew, he'd started Freenode, and projects flocked to it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- barkingcat 6y ago
  unofficial irc logging services are kinda like the "I don't want to pay anyone, but I want to freeload off someone's netflix account" of the irc age. If the material was important to someone, they would already be connected with a bouncer or logger of some kind. For people who can't run bouncers, etc, this is a good service, but again - if you really thought it was vital to your work and/or personal life, you would have spent some money to either purchase an irc service (like irccloud, etc) or pay someone to run a proper logging service. The historical aspects are not nearly as dire in my opinion, - all someone has to do is to get a copy of the archive from this person (who doesn't seem opposed to this idea) - and host it somewhere. Again, the problem is costs - if someone deamed it important enough, they will mirror it. In this age, probably someone like the Internet Archive since no one will pay for the maintenance (legally, technically, and otherwise).
- 1996 6y ago
  freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing. The logs - depend on your stance. For what I do, no logs is better. Fewer logs may drive more people back. But here are many other loggers. FYI, IRC is still very handy to have and deploy in 2020. It is light enough for a small VPS to handle, easy to scale by federating if needed, and the lack of file support and of logs can be a feature to keep everything private for in house deployments. Just this morning I started to evaluate replacing some Javascript and Go code by some Fortran. I'm starting to believe in the army motto: "Yesterday technology, tomorrow!"
  - snvzz 6y ago
    >freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing. And it wouldn't kill IRC. Projects would just relocate to other irc networks, such as oftc. Some new networks might emerge.
- cbm-vic-20 6y ago
  IRC is still hanging in there. You can get a taste by using the web UI, no registration required. 1) Go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ 2) Type something into the "Nick" box. 3) Solve the CAPTCHA 4) Hit Start. Freenode has thousands of channels, there's a bot called "alis" that can help you find something interesting. To do that: 5) type "/msg alis list python -min 50", which will open a chat with alis, which will then show the channels with "python" in the name that have at least 50 users. 6) type "/join #python" to join the channel Some channels require you to register before you can chat, for that, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration
- rhizome 6y ago
  First of all, you're not too young for IRC, it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! Depending on your interests your usage could resemble a live-action Reddit. Second, I don't think this is necessarily a big deal, though I could imagine that channel users liked the convenience of having their channel logged for them. There may even have been an ersatz Slack use-case there that people could easily get used to. However, channel logging has historically been the responsibility of channel users themselves, so there's a loss of convenience that could easily be taken up by a channel user setting up their own facility: a tiny AWS instance running a bot logging to S3, with a web interface and maybe a search engine. But that takes time and money and maintenance and interest. However, all of this functionality is out there on the web and internet, and has been used for a long time in various incarnations. I'm sure there are EFNet logs out there that go back well into the 90s.
  - michaelcampbell 6y ago
    > it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! s/channels/code So is COBOL.
  - txdv 6y ago
    there are dozens of us! dozens!
- uk_programmer 6y ago
  IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice. IRC has a ton of advantages: 1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school. 2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting. 3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison 4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language. https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/ https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/ 5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself. e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language 6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time. 7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server. 8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.
  - barkingcat 6y ago
    re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary, and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds are when you want to download it out of the service itself.
    - uk_programmer 6y ago
      Also can't script the client, you can't run your own server. Also with MIRC IIRC correctly you could layout the chat windows pretty much anyway you wanted and even have like a desktop background. Discord is a lot easier to use, but in a lot of ways it is really limited compared to the IRC clients.
  - gknoy 6y ago
- ori_b 6y ago
  IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical help and discussion for most projects.
  - hguant 6y ago
    The various haskell IRC channels are some of the best places to learn and get help/mentoring with that language - so many patient, genuinely helpful people. It's one of those things that made me go "Oh, that's what everyone is moaning abut" re demise of the old web etc.
  - echelon 6y ago
    It absolutely still is. If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow, or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have an answer in under five minutes and an interactive explanation. IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam, advertisement, and noise.
    - ghostpepper 6y ago
      Not to mention that often the author and/or contributors of the technology in question may be available to answer advanced questions.
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      >Without all the spam You must remember a different IRC to me. Spam bots were a semi frequent thing.
- idclip 6y ago
  If gmail had a dad who was more famous and more successful in a world no one remembered anymore. Think of the father in “there will be blood”.
- dhodell 6y ago
  I've used IRC for over 20 years and have never heard of this service. On your scale, it's "your second cousin's friend's sister's dog's goldfish had a VPS that went down." This is #2 on HN because people are reading "Freenode IRC ... is shutting down." That'd be closer to the gmail end of your spectrum. We are not shutting down freenode.
- ken 6y ago
  This is just one logging service, not any actual IRC servers. So today's news is not necessarily a huge deal. IRC as a system, though, is massively important. I'd say it's like the Twitter of the first half (so far) of the internet. When the (first) Gulf War began, the first reports were via IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835
infogulch 6y ago
I wonder if archive.org would be interested...
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Already pushed WARC files into the Archive for Wayback ingestion.
ragest69 6y ago
Oh
rasengan 6y ago
I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others! IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others. You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24]. [1] https://freenode.net https://freenode.net [2] https://oftc.net https://oftc.net [3] https://rizon.net https://rizon.net [4] https://www.dal.net https://www.dal.net [5] https://tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org [6] https://snoonet.org/ https://snoonet.org/ [7] https://quakenet.org/ https://quakenet.org/ [8] https://efnet.org https://efnet.org [9] https://ircnet.com https://ircnet.com [10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php [11] https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ [12] https://kiwiirc.com https://kiwiirc.com [13] https://codeux.com/textual https://codeux.com/textual [14] https://palaverapp.com/ https://palaverapp.com/ [15] https://mirc.com/ https://mirc.com/ [16] https://adiirc.com/ https://adiirc.com/ [17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot [18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot [19] https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ [20] https://znc.in https://znc.in [21] https://irccloud.com/ https://irccloud.com/ [22] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/ [23] https://www.bitlbee.org/ https://www.bitlbee.org/ [24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!
- Avamander 6y ago
  You've missed the best IRC bouncer-client there is - Quassel.
kgraves 6y ago
Can I use this on my iPhone? I haven't been able to find easy to use ones.
- uniquelygeneric 6y ago
  I prefer Igloo IRC, but finding a server and chatroom is an exercise you'll have to do on your own depending on what you are looking for. I would start with Freenode if you don't know where to begin.
  - mwest 6y ago
    The screenshots for Igloo look nice, but the developer responses to reviews are... entertaining, and concerning.
    - eloahx 6y ago
      yeah he's legit crazy
- mattl 6y ago
  I use IRCCloud, the app is decent.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
This is sad because BotBot.me shut down not that long ago too. We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment. https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/ https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/
perlgeek 6y ago
I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the perl/raku communities, but also other channels). Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly impossible to me, so I shut down some time ago. (It might have violated earlier privacy regulations as well, hard to tell). Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it goes to court, none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own lawyer seemed too expensive, and nobody who asked me to continue running it offered to pay for a lawyer either. Tough luck.
- kirstenbirgit 6y ago
  what do you imagine would have happened if you kept it running?
  - perlgeek 6y ago
    There's a 80% chance that nothing would have happened, a 15% chance that people would complain about the privacy implications but won't do anything about it, and a 5% chance that somebody takes action and I get some sort of legal citation/penalty/whatever. All percentages estimations only, of course :-)
jtakkala 6y ago
A long time ago parsing Echelog logs was how I was able to monitor the IRC activity of an attacker at a company I used to work at. I didn't normally sit on these channels myself, but Echelog enabled me to look back and collect data on the various handles that this person operated under. There were 20-something handles they used over approximately a 6 month period of monitoring. I was always able to find a small piece of information to correlate these handles together. Sometimes it started with a hunch, such as the language (even slang) they would use, but eventually they'd slip up in some way and we'd have a pretty irrefutable link to the person. This information helped us develop a motive behind the hack and the ongoing public info was then fed to national crime agencies. My employer never went through with prosecution, but as this person was of much interest behind other hacks they were eventually prosecuted and convicted. I always wondered if my occasional Echelog intelligence reports ever had a role in that conviction.
- unixhero 6y ago
  For the record, careful with doing private investigations. It might look good on Netflix, but can turn sour real fast.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    What can happen?
    - gjs278 6y ago
      nothing. this guy is delusional.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      There's probably a chance of you being retaliated against or going to jail yourself, depending on how you're doing the snooping.
      - jtakkala 6y ago
        Indeed, and in that respect Echelog was a great source of OSINT material for the anecdote I described above. That, along with `whois` data and other public databases can reveal a lot without putting oneself at legal risk.
jdsully 6y ago
I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.
- overcast 6y ago
  I'd stay off the internet then.
  - jdsully 6y ago
    Simpler times my friend.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Are you planning to delete this comment in a couple of days?
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    "not everything" differs from "nothing"
  - str34ml1n3 6y ago
    HN only lets you delete comments that are less than something like 2 hours old, I think.
- Geeflow 6y ago
  I would have shared the same sentiment. I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active on IRC. Are loggers a more recent (as in this millenium) development?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I would say chat history and asymmetrical scheduling for chat are expectations in this day and age, and the lack of them is one of the biggest reasons people find IRC irritating or difficult. (I ask a question, and if the person fit to answer it isn't logged in right now, it never gets even responded to.) Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack, etc. allows you to see messages while you were offline. Compared to things from the older eras of messaging like AIM and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone unless they were online as well. So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a relatively more modern element: They're filling in a gap IRC has with modern chat clients.
andarleen 6y ago
I am surprised that privacy aware companies are not using IRC more for their intra company chat, and that none invested in a webcam voice chat client for IRC. Even the most basic server can handle thousands of clients.
- hkt 6y ago
  I recall working at companies where the ops or DevOps teams would run their own IRC servers pre-slack. It was basically the only way to get stuff done if you had a desktop PC and needed to work closely with anyone. The problem is that most companies don't know how to do due diligence on a tool like IRC and the clients aren't very friendly. The lack of commercialisation of the space is what prevented companies from paying for it, and that meant no easy and rich clients got built, which meant it never got commercialised, etc etc..
eloahx 6y ago
I have an irc server, no rules, nothing illegal though. we have fun! irc.t60group.org +6697 #kotu
hkt 6y ago
Honestly, it is sad but I grew up on IRC. Time to put all those ill advised remarks to bed..
superkuh 6y ago
Sad to see GDPR still slowly killing anything too small to pay a legal team (basically anything that can be sued that hasn't incorporated, ie, human persons). > Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running the site, no longer makes sense for me.
snvzz 6y ago
Good riddance. I like irc more when I don't have to measure every word I say because some douchebag is silently logging everything and putting it in a website for everybody to see, index and archive, without my permission or anybody else's.

So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.

Operyl 6y ago
Having used IRC, not that big of a deal in my opinion. Most channels run their own log archives, and you always have your own.
ryanong 6y ago
IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server. There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  yah, but this particular service, which is a logging server run by an individual, isn't really all that significant in the grand scheme of things.
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  If Freenode was shutting down it would be closer to "gmail is shutting down" IMHO.
  - maccard 6y ago
    According to another comment in this thread, Freenode has 90k CCU, with hundreds of thousands over a period of a few months. The best number I can find for gmail is here [0], which shows Gmail had 72 million active users on android 6 years ago. Sorry to say but Freenode shutting down wouldn't even be a blip compared to gmail shutting down [0] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2014/tops-of-2014-digital/ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2014/tops-of-...
    - heinrich5991 6y ago
      I believe it was meant in proportion to the size of email vs IRC. > Sorry to say but Please just drop that prefix.
      - ghostpepper 6y ago
        The scale requested was actually: > On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?
- abstractbeliefs 6y ago
  Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I think this would be useful: how many unique users have sent at least one message in the last 24 hours? I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day. There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-related webdev Discord servers that that each have at least 100 unique users interacting daily. I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just echoes in the system, autoreconnecting from old hardware long after their owners have moved on. In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing great!" But frankly I don't think people realize how much IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has been eaten and it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging people who once used it in its prime.
    - dhodell 6y ago
      Many IRC communities have shrunk. Different reasons. Things like Discord and mumble, combined with more collaboration and multiplayer competition in games took gamers away from IRC and crippled networks like Gamesurge. Social media, especially things like Twitter and the various short video sharing services took away the "general chat" demographic -- partially because folks who were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel closer, and folks who are not tend to be younger, and the younger demographic trends towards newer technologies. Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as you point out this isn't always the case. I would argue that freenode is probably safe from too much decline for a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit harsh :)) also tend to be people with a lot of experience in $technical_topic. If you want to ask questions about $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on IRC, that's where you go. You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is not on IRC. Javascript is a relatively new technology (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer, and Elm newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability to run native applications written in JS has caused that community to surge. It's also relatively easier to get into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So you attract more people, and you're going to attract younger people, and you're going to have a really diverse audience for a wide range of topics. All of a sudden a single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem like fun, so you decide to use Discord or Slack. I think this makes a lot of sense for lots of communities. For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical communities, IRC is still a good solution. It's not fair to say that "its lunch has been eaten" -- it'll remain relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most accessible way to communicate. But there are other, different solutions for similar problems that do a better job of catering to specific audiences. And that's just fine. Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts from server stats, which are mostly aggregates. So I can't answer that question. But Freenode's a rather active network.
- neilv 6y ago
  Agreed. Freenode was (and should still be, IMHO) the go-to real-time chat for open source projects. I didn't realize how important at the time it was being founded. Rob Levin was an online acquaintance, and one day he started asking about how to fund an open source community service with donations. I was interested in open source and non-profits, so he and I talked a bit about that, but I didn't volunteer to help. Next thing I knew, he'd started Freenode, and projects flocked to it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
barkingcat 6y ago
unofficial irc logging services are kinda like the "I don't want to pay anyone, but I want to freeload off someone's netflix account" of the irc age. If the material was important to someone, they would already be connected with a bouncer or logger of some kind. For people who can't run bouncers, etc, this is a good service, but again - if you really thought it was vital to your work and/or personal life, you would have spent some money to either purchase an irc service (like irccloud, etc) or pay someone to run a proper logging service. The historical aspects are not nearly as dire in my opinion, - all someone has to do is to get a copy of the archive from this person (who doesn't seem opposed to this idea) - and host it somewhere. Again, the problem is costs - if someone deamed it important enough, they will mirror it. In this age, probably someone like the Internet Archive since no one will pay for the maintenance (legally, technically, and otherwise).
1996 6y ago
freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing. The logs - depend on your stance. For what I do, no logs is better. Fewer logs may drive more people back. But here are many other loggers. FYI, IRC is still very handy to have and deploy in 2020. It is light enough for a small VPS to handle, easy to scale by federating if needed, and the lack of file support and of logs can be a feature to keep everything private for in house deployments. Just this morning I started to evaluate replacing some Javascript and Go code by some Fortran. I'm starting to believe in the army motto: "Yesterday technology, tomorrow!"
- snvzz 6y ago
  >freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing. And it wouldn't kill IRC. Projects would just relocate to other irc networks, such as oftc. Some new networks might emerge.
cbm-vic-20 6y ago
IRC is still hanging in there. You can get a taste by using the web UI, no registration required. 1) Go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ 2) Type something into the "Nick" box. 3) Solve the CAPTCHA 4) Hit Start. Freenode has thousands of channels, there's a bot called "alis" that can help you find something interesting. To do that: 5) type "/msg alis list python -min 50", which will open a chat with alis, which will then show the channels with "python" in the name that have at least 50 users. 6) type "/join #python" to join the channel Some channels require you to register before you can chat, for that, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration
rhizome 6y ago
First of all, you're not too young for IRC, it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! Depending on your interests your usage could resemble a live-action Reddit. Second, I don't think this is necessarily a big deal, though I could imagine that channel users liked the convenience of having their channel logged for them. There may even have been an ersatz Slack use-case there that people could easily get used to. However, channel logging has historically been the responsibility of channel users themselves, so there's a loss of convenience that could easily be taken up by a channel user setting up their own facility: a tiny AWS instance running a bot logging to S3, with a web interface and maybe a search engine. But that takes time and money and maintenance and interest. However, all of this functionality is out there on the web and internet, and has been used for a long time in various incarnations. I'm sure there are EFNet logs out there that go back well into the 90s.
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  > it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! s/channels/code So is COBOL.
- txdv 6y ago
  there are dozens of us! dozens!
uk_programmer 6y ago
IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice. IRC has a ton of advantages: 1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school. 2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting. 3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison 4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language. https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/ https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/ 5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself. e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language 6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time. 7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server. 8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary, and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds are when you want to download it out of the service itself.
  - uk_programmer 6y ago
    Also can't script the client, you can't run your own server. Also with MIRC IIRC correctly you could layout the chat windows pretty much anyway you wanted and even have like a desktop background. Discord is a lot easier to use, but in a lot of ways it is really limited compared to the IRC clients.
- gknoy 6y ago
ori_b 6y ago
IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical help and discussion for most projects.
- hguant 6y ago
  The various haskell IRC channels are some of the best places to learn and get help/mentoring with that language - so many patient, genuinely helpful people. It's one of those things that made me go "Oh, that's what everyone is moaning abut" re demise of the old web etc.
- echelon 6y ago
  It absolutely still is. If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow, or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have an answer in under five minutes and an interactive explanation. IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam, advertisement, and noise.
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    Not to mention that often the author and/or contributors of the technology in question may be available to answer advanced questions.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    >Without all the spam You must remember a different IRC to me. Spam bots were a semi frequent thing.
idclip 6y ago
If gmail had a dad who was more famous and more successful in a world no one remembered anymore. Think of the father in “there will be blood”.
dhodell 6y ago
I've used IRC for over 20 years and have never heard of this service. On your scale, it's "your second cousin's friend's sister's dog's goldfish had a VPS that went down." This is #2 on HN because people are reading "Freenode IRC ... is shutting down." That'd be closer to the gmail end of your spectrum. We are not shutting down freenode.
ken 6y ago
This is just one logging service, not any actual IRC servers. So today's news is not necessarily a huge deal. IRC as a system, though, is massively important. I'd say it's like the Twitter of the first half (so far) of the internet. When the (first) Gulf War began, the first reports were via IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835

infogulch 6y ago

I wonder if archive.org would be interested...

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Already pushed WARC files into the Archive for Wayback ingestion.

ragest69 6y ago

rasengan 6y ago

I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others! IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others. You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24]. [1] https://freenode.net https://freenode.net [2] https://oftc.net https://oftc.net [3] https://rizon.net https://rizon.net [4] https://www.dal.net https://www.dal.net [5] https://tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org [6] https://snoonet.org/ https://snoonet.org/ [7] https://quakenet.org/ https://quakenet.org/ [8] https://efnet.org https://efnet.org [9] https://ircnet.com https://ircnet.com [10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php [11] https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ [12] https://kiwiirc.com https://kiwiirc.com [13] https://codeux.com/textual https://codeux.com/textual [14] https://palaverapp.com/ https://palaverapp.com/ [15] https://mirc.com/ https://mirc.com/ [16] https://adiirc.com/ https://adiirc.com/ [17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot [18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot [19] https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ [20] https://znc.in https://znc.in [21] https://irccloud.com/ https://irccloud.com/ [22] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/ [23] https://www.bitlbee.org/ https://www.bitlbee.org/ [24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!

Avamander 6y ago
You've missed the best IRC bouncer-client there is - Quassel.

kgraves 6y ago

Can I use this on my iPhone? I haven't been able to find easy to use ones.

uniquelygeneric 6y ago
I prefer Igloo IRC, but finding a server and chatroom is an exercise you'll have to do on your own depending on what you are looking for. I would start with Freenode if you don't know where to begin.
- mwest 6y ago
  The screenshots for Igloo look nice, but the developer responses to reviews are... entertaining, and concerning.
  - eloahx 6y ago
    yeah he's legit crazy
mattl 6y ago
I use IRCCloud, the app is decent.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

This is sad because BotBot.me shut down not that long ago too. We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment. https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/ https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/

perlgeek 6y ago

I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the perl/raku communities, but also other channels). Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly impossible to me, so I shut down some time ago. (It might have violated earlier privacy regulations as well, hard to tell). Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it goes to court, none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own lawyer seemed too expensive, and nobody who asked me to continue running it offered to pay for a lawyer either. Tough luck.

kirstenbirgit 6y ago
what do you imagine would have happened if you kept it running?
- perlgeek 6y ago
  There's a 80% chance that nothing would have happened, a 15% chance that people would complain about the privacy implications but won't do anything about it, and a 5% chance that somebody takes action and I get some sort of legal citation/penalty/whatever. All percentages estimations only, of course :-)

jtakkala 6y ago

A long time ago parsing Echelog logs was how I was able to monitor the IRC activity of an attacker at a company I used to work at. I didn't normally sit on these channels myself, but Echelog enabled me to look back and collect data on the various handles that this person operated under. There were 20-something handles they used over approximately a 6 month period of monitoring. I was always able to find a small piece of information to correlate these handles together. Sometimes it started with a hunch, such as the language (even slang) they would use, but eventually they'd slip up in some way and we'd have a pretty irrefutable link to the person. This information helped us develop a motive behind the hack and the ongoing public info was then fed to national crime agencies. My employer never went through with prosecution, but as this person was of much interest behind other hacks they were eventually prosecuted and convicted. I always wondered if my occasional Echelog intelligence reports ever had a role in that conviction.

unixhero 6y ago
For the record, careful with doing private investigations. It might look good on Netflix, but can turn sour real fast.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  What can happen?
  - gjs278 6y ago
    nothing. this guy is delusional.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    There's probably a chance of you being retaliated against or going to jail yourself, depending on how you're doing the snooping.
    - jtakkala 6y ago
      Indeed, and in that respect Echelog was a great source of OSINT material for the anecdote I described above. That, along with `whois` data and other public databases can reveal a lot without putting oneself at legal risk.

jdsully 6y ago

I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.

overcast 6y ago
I'd stay off the internet then.
- jdsully 6y ago
  Simpler times my friend.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Are you planning to delete this comment in a couple of days?
- guerrilla 6y ago
  "not everything" differs from "nothing"
- str34ml1n3 6y ago
  HN only lets you delete comments that are less than something like 2 hours old, I think.
Geeflow 6y ago
I would have shared the same sentiment. I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active on IRC. Are loggers a more recent (as in this millenium) development?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I would say chat history and asymmetrical scheduling for chat are expectations in this day and age, and the lack of them is one of the biggest reasons people find IRC irritating or difficult. (I ask a question, and if the person fit to answer it isn't logged in right now, it never gets even responded to.) Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack, etc. allows you to see messages while you were offline. Compared to things from the older eras of messaging like AIM and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone unless they were online as well. So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a relatively more modern element: They're filling in a gap IRC has with modern chat clients.

andarleen 6y ago

I am surprised that privacy aware companies are not using IRC more for their intra company chat, and that none invested in a webcam voice chat client for IRC. Even the most basic server can handle thousands of clients.

hkt 6y ago
I recall working at companies where the ops or DevOps teams would run their own IRC servers pre-slack. It was basically the only way to get stuff done if you had a desktop PC and needed to work closely with anyone. The problem is that most companies don't know how to do due diligence on a tool like IRC and the clients aren't very friendly. The lack of commercialisation of the space is what prevented companies from paying for it, and that meant no easy and rich clients got built, which meant it never got commercialised, etc etc..

eloahx 6y ago

I have an irc server, no rules, nothing illegal though. we have fun! irc.t60group.org +6697 #kotu

hkt 6y ago

Honestly, it is sad but I grew up on IRC. Time to put all those ill advised remarks to bed..

superkuh 6y ago

Sad to see GDPR still slowly killing anything too small to pay a legal team (basically anything that can be sued that hasn't incorporated, ie, human persons). > Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running the site, no longer makes sense for me.

snvzz 6y ago

Good riddance. I like irc more when I don't have to measure every word I say because some douchebag is silently logging everything and putting it in a website for everybody to see, index and archive, without my permission or anybody else's.