You could write a simple client that just ignores connect/disconnect messages from the server. Reading this post I remembered a small project called sociograph

You could write a simple client that just ignores connect/disconnect messages from the server. Reading this post I remembered a small project called sociograph a friend of mine created. It's an IRC bot that logs messages and draws a graph of the people communicating with each other in realtime, see for an example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ah-SE-cNY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ah-SE-cNY.