The RFC ostensibly covers the server protocol too, but as-is, there are tons of extensions to make things actually work well (e.g. what happens on rejoin after

The RFC ostensibly covers the server protocol too, but as-is, there are tons of extensions to make things actually work well (e.g. what happens on rejoin after a netsplit). It's a bit sad IRC servers are no longer all the rage, because it would be interesting to see how good we could actually make them with current technology and programming practice. 1M+ users on a server should be easily attainable, for instance. And presumably a much more robust distributed system than just “connect them all in a spanning tree and accept any inconsistencies” (i.e., support redundant connections). I've seen a couple of times where A deopped B and B was still able to kick A (because they were on different servers), leaving the channel opless :-)