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Most of IRC is on those 'channels' (#whatever). and most channels (at least back in the day) were public, so you could just go to #books or whatever. For exam

Most of IRC is on those 'channels' (#whatever). and most channels (at least back in the day) were public, so you could just go to #books or whatever. For example, I spent my formative years on #uiuc, where there was a healthy community of 50-100 people from the university I was at. Newcomers would stop by on a regular basis and ask a question or just start chatting or troll or even grief--there were kickbans and scripts and bots to help manage larger communities. Also these persistent channels are created just by joining the channel with that name; they disappear when the last person leaves. Notably, the first person to join a chatroom gets "operator" status, and thus the rights to change channel settings and kick/ban people etc. So there evolved a culture of bots, who would sit in channels with op status and 'occupy' it in case someone came along; these bots had op status themselves, and were programmed to auto-ban certain users or even domains, and auto-op their owners and their owners' friends. slap me summa dat +o. And of course, there were the bot wars and the attempts at deliberate netsplits to try and steal op status, which were fun games for the script kiddies, but would really take the piss out of your evening chat when they would come by.

shifto 6y ago
Totally forgot about the slap command. Thought of it because you said to 'slap you some of that +O'. shifto slaps rabidrat around a bit with a large trout
- senko 6y ago
  Fun fact: slap was a client command that just sent "action" over the channel/privmsg, which would get rendered as something like: * <nick> <action text> More generally, on most clients you could use "/me <text" command to do the same thing. And on the protocol level, it was done by a mini-protocol on top of IRC, called DCC (direct client-connection), that would look like: PRIVMSG #channel :^AACTION text^A (where "PRIVMSG #channel :text" was a way to send a normal message, and ^A is Ctrl-A). DCC was also used as signalling for file transfer. Clients wishing to send files would open a high-end port on their machine and send a DCC message with the file name, IP and port to connect to (similar to active FTP). (yes, I spent an inordinate amount on time on IRC...)
  - shifto 6y ago
    Fun fact indeed! I knew all these things but never how they actually worked. When I was deep into IRC I was a bit too young to understand the technical side of it but I sure knew how to download a lot of warez over DCC!

shifto 6y ago

Totally forgot about the slap command. Thought of it because you said to 'slap you some of that +O'. shifto slaps rabidrat around a bit with a large trout

senko 6y ago
Fun fact: slap was a client command that just sent "action" over the channel/privmsg, which would get rendered as something like: * <nick> <action text> More generally, on most clients you could use "/me <text" command to do the same thing. And on the protocol level, it was done by a mini-protocol on top of IRC, called DCC (direct client-connection), that would look like: PRIVMSG #channel :^AACTION text^A (where "PRIVMSG #channel :text" was a way to send a normal message, and ^A is Ctrl-A). DCC was also used as signalling for file transfer. Clients wishing to send files would open a high-end port on their machine and send a DCC message with the file name, IP and port to connect to (similar to active FTP). (yes, I spent an inordinate amount on time on IRC...)
- shifto 6y ago
  Fun fact indeed! I knew all these things but never how they actually worked. When I was deep into IRC I was a bit too young to understand the technical side of it but I sure knew how to download a lot of warez over DCC!