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> It was deemed the problems were bigger than the new possibilities. I mean, we could speak Finnish/English just fine and there was usually no need for any othe

> It was deemed the problems were bigger than the new possibilities. I mean, we could speak Finnish/English just fine and there was usually no need for any other languages. It also excluded a large part of the world from participating on IRC. Maybe if it was more proactive, IRC would have a larger role to play than it does now? Another example is punycode. unicode URLs are super unreadable, so no wonder the rest of the earth's population doesn't care enough about the open web, the importance of URLs vs Apps.

Ndymium 5y ago
> It also excluded a large part of the world from participating on IRC. Maybe if it was more proactive, IRC would have a larger role to play than it does now? I have to clarify that this was based on my experience in Finnish IRC channels. We spoke Finnish (and some English because English is everywhere) and we did not wish to bring any other languages into our channels as we wouldn't be able to speak Finnish then anymore. The character set issues were really just about our own special characters and ISO-8859-1 vs ISO-8859-15 vs UTF-8 users. Obviously character set issues probably did discourage some people from using IRC but I doubt it had anything to do with Finnish channels specifically. In the end, I think IRC was just overtaken by more convenient and featureful technologies (not to say that IRC is dead, but it's far from what it used to be). Punycode is another one of those unfortunate things we have to have to deal with due to things like homograph attacks (apple.com vs аpple.com).
- wink 5y ago
  I remember this as well on IRCNet on a few German channels. Basically mostly it was decided that everyone had to configure ISO-8859-1 (or ascii) or be kicked, and at some point the majority of ops then decided that now UTF-8 was correct. It didn't feel great a lot of the time, but to be fair those were communities governed by some people and the barrier to entry was configuring your client correctly. I might be misremembering but most bigger channels kinda agreed on the timeline, so they all switched to UTF-8 around the same time, so it kinda worked.
- kergonath 5y ago
  The very same thing happened in French-speaking channels.

Ndymium 5y ago

> It also excluded a large part of the world from participating on IRC. Maybe if it was more proactive, IRC would have a larger role to play than it does now? I have to clarify that this was based on my experience in Finnish IRC channels. We spoke Finnish (and some English because English is everywhere) and we did not wish to bring any other languages into our channels as we wouldn't be able to speak Finnish then anymore. The character set issues were really just about our own special characters and ISO-8859-1 vs ISO-8859-15 vs UTF-8 users. Obviously character set issues probably did discourage some people from using IRC but I doubt it had anything to do with Finnish channels specifically. In the end, I think IRC was just overtaken by more convenient and featureful technologies (not to say that IRC is dead, but it's far from what it used to be). Punycode is another one of those unfortunate things we have to have to deal with due to things like homograph attacks (apple.com vs аpple.com).

wink 5y ago
I remember this as well on IRCNet on a few German channels. Basically mostly it was decided that everyone had to configure ISO-8859-1 (or ascii) or be kicked, and at some point the majority of ops then decided that now UTF-8 was correct. It didn't feel great a lot of the time, but to be fair those were communities governed by some people and the barrier to entry was configuring your client correctly. I might be misremembering but most bigger channels kinda agreed on the timeline, so they all switched to UTF-8 around the same time, so it kinda worked.
kergonath 5y ago
The very same thing happened in French-speaking channels.