Basically, the old IRC protocol was pretty brittle. You could break the network with DDOS attacks, exploits, etc. in order to get "ops" on IRC channels. This re

Basically, the old IRC protocol was pretty brittle. You could break the network with DDOS attacks, exploits, etc. in order to get "ops" on IRC channels. This resulted in a sort of emergent hacker game called channel wars. Massive attacks were constantly being launched, to the point that running an IRC server became a way to have a serious target painted on your connection.