20 ms·

IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen

131 points by of 12y ago

bemmu 12y ago
IRC is awesome. The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In that important feature Twitter/Slack is superior. By the way, #startups on freenode seems to have the most HN users on it.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  > The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In my use of it - primarily social, less technical - this is actually a huge benefit. Whereas things I say on Facebook, on Twitter, even on Skype groups float around forever, this doesn't happen on IRC. Only the other people in the channel log things, and if someone else turns up, they don't see what I've been talking about - the exact contents of my discussions aren't floating about forever so long as people don't intentionally distribute them.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    This is also one of the (original) benefits of 4chan. It's not merely anonymous, but it is also ephemeral. However, these days there are IRC loggers and 4chan archivers.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      There's only IRC loggers that you can see, though - if you know (practically) everyone in a channel at a given point in time, you're reasonably safe - not 100%, but reasonably. Which is about good enough for most things.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      You guys know that probably every third person on Freenode has his or her own IRC bot on the channel? ;). Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I'm yet to see a popular channel that isn't logged either publicly or privately.
  - ashark 12y ago
    IRC's one of the only things that makes me feel like the early web did. A bunch of mostly-anonymous people collaborating or just hanging out, and it doesn't seem like everyone's trying to make a buck or polish their "personal brand". Little or no official corporate presence. No one's worried anything they write will ruin their lives, justly or unjustly. It's the "no one knows you're a dog" web of yesteryear. I miss when more of the web was like that. It's nice.
    - mongol 12y ago
      Well put. It is quite different now.
  - yborg 12y ago
    Most channel bots log, and most channels have bots to provide application services (like history searching). I have 5 continuous years of history for some of the channel bots I run. There used to be a bot that would try and join every public channel and produced a web-searchable archive of transcripts, I don't know if this is still running.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      Most channels I'm in don't have channel bots - one XKCD-related subchannel does (and it doesn't log), and the local hackspace's does (and it doesn't log either), but I'm in another half a dozen channels that don't.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  > IRC is awesome. The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In that important feature Twitter/Slack is superior. I use bip[1], which is an IRC bouncer. I basically connect to networks from a remote machine, and when I hop into IRC, I connect to that machine - which gives me some playback of what's been said beforehand, so I know at least some of the context. This doesn't solve the 'problem' for joining new channels, but it's nice if you have regular channels you hang out in. 1: https://bip.milkypond.org/ https://bip.milkypond.org/ (their cert is broken :/)
  - iancarroll 12y ago
    ZNC is also a good bouncer (I use it).
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      I used znc for a bit, and switched to bip for ... some reason that I can't recall, now. I think the configuration for bip was easier than znc?
      - iancarroll 12y ago
        I don't find it hard. The webadmin module lets you configure everything via a web interface if you're inclined to.
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  I think that comparing Twitter or Slack to IRC in that manner is a broken comparison. Neither of those services can possibly stand up next to IRC, an open protocol with several dozen client and server implementations and millions of users. IRC thrives because it's so open and easy to use from a programmer's point of view. There's no centralized authority or point of failure with IRC.
- gghh 12y ago
  About history: of course you can run your own IRC bouncer if you're willing to host it, but irccloud https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ is such a no-brain solution that more and more IRC users have it.
  - toxicFork 12y ago
    Yep, I was making my own web based irc bouncer/client until I saw irccloud and my project was instantly dumped and I'm now gladly paying them!
  - kapilvt 12y ago
    i'm a user... aware of irccloud since the extended beta, but recently a user due to various nesc. evils of corporate networking. except honestly the ui sucks for history and non existent search sucks compared to botbot.me ie. https://botbot.me/freenode/google-containers/ https://botbot.me/freenode/google-containers/ erlang vs python .. connected clients vs historical search.. apples and oranges i guess...
- petercooper 12y ago
  I've never implemented one, but surely an ircd could do this if it wanted to? When someone joins a channel, send them a certain number of lines of history straight away, etc?
  - DasIch 12y ago
    The protocol provides no way to send a scrollback or a history of messages. Additionally messages have no timestamp, so you don't know when they were written, only when you received them.
    - ReidZB 12y ago
      I'm no IRC expert, but I do know that some IRCds do support sending a scrollback / channel history. For example, InspIRCd's chanhistory module: https://wiki.inspircd.org/Modules/2.0/chanhistory https://wiki.inspircd.org/Modules/2.0/chanhistory How it actually accomplishes that within the framework of the "protocol," I don't know.
      - scrollaway 12y ago
        The messages are sent as extra messages, duplicating timestamps and faking senders and overall it's pretty ugly. The Quassel protocol supports this, unfortunately it looks like the quassel team doesn't care about taking it further than where it is.
        grawity 12y ago
        Timestamps – there's a standard extension for this (see IRCv3 above). ZNC has been using it for maybe a year. Senders – there's absolutely no reason to fake senders, since it was always valid for messages to come from people not in the channel.
        SaberUK 12y ago
        Full disclosure: I am one of the developers on the aforementioned IRC server. In a future release InspIRCd will adopt support for the server-time extension which will allow us to get rid of the timestamp duplication if a user's client supports it.
- klapinat0r 12y ago
  https://botbot.me/ https://botbot.me/
- raimue 12y ago
  I consider not seeing the previous history a feature. When I say something to a group of people currently in a room, I only address these people and this message is not necessarily intended for anyone joining later.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
So, here's a fun historical detail. ISO 646[0] was a 7-bit character encoding, of which ASCII is a superset. It defined a common subset of characters that would always be available, leaving a few codepoints for local supersets to fill in. ASCII used some of those for punctuation, but Scandinavian character sets[1] filled them with extra lowercase and uppercase letters with diacritics. IRC came from Finland, so it was designed for those charsets. But the standard for the Internet is supposed to be ASCII, so what happens when you use those codes from ASCII that correspond to extra letters in the Scandinavian character sets? Take a look at RFC 1459:[2] Because of IRC's scandanavian origin, the characters {}| are considered to be the lower case equivalents of the characters []\, respectively. This is a critical issue when determining the equivalence of two nicknames. Cute, right? Try it, it actually works (at least on Freenode!). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#National_variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#National_variants [2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459 § 2.3
- vor_ 12y ago
  RFC 1459 left out ~ and ^, which are usually also case mapped.
  - secure 12y ago
    But ~ is not a valid character in nicknames in the first place, according to RFC 1459, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-2.3.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-2.3.1: <nick> ::= <letter> { <letter> | <number> | <special> } <letter> ::= 'a' ... 'z' | 'A' ... 'Z' <number> ::= '0' ... '9' <special> ::= '-' | '[' | ']' | '\' | '`' | '^' | '{' | '}'
- userbinator 12y ago
  I wonder how they used programming languages which assign special meaning to those characters; use ASCII and the code looks fine but string constants with those characters will be very odd, use the local variant and the string constants look better but the code worse. foo[1] = "\r\n"; fooÄ1Å = "ÖrÖn"; Perhaps it's something you just get used to after a while. The standard QWERTY keyboard has a reversed form of this "caseness" , with lowercase being []\ and their "uppercase" shifted versions {}|.
Raphmedia 12y ago
Anyone else has the issue that every IRC channel seems dead? If I'm very lucky, I'll find an active channel, but it will die in about a month. Perhaps I am simply not looking in the right places.
- ReidZB 12y ago
  There are many large Freenode channels that don't appear to be dying any time soon, like #bash, #archlinux, ##linux, etc. (Though, just because they're large and not dying doesn't mean they're worth hanging out in. :) ) As a tip, on Freenode, you can message the Alis bot to list channels: /msg alis list *linux* The reply from Alis will include how many users are in channels whose names match linux. If it has >500 users, it probably isn't going anywhere any time soon. (You can do this for other topics that interest you, of course.)
  - lfowles 12y ago
    It seems that many subreddits also have thriving IRC communities. See: #boardgames on Freenode, which probably has ~150 connected at any given time. So it's not only the big channels!
- adventureloop 12y ago
  The channel for my local hackerspace is quite active, but not so busy that you can't keep track of what is going on. I also loiter in some bsd channels that are reasonably active as well. It probably helps to find channels that have a purpose behind them.
- ashmud 12y ago
  These days, I only go to IRC when I have a specific purpose in mind. Some online groups [still] use it almost as a support channel. It [the way I use it now] is not like my days in uni when it was a popular form of "casual chat."
  - lfowles 12y ago
    I'm still in many casual chat channels. The general topic ones are the best for this, not ones with a strict "Support/Devel for $PROJECT" mentality that shut down offtopic conversation immediately. It's also a matter of finding like minded individuals to chat with, which does seem harder than it was when I was in highschool a decade ago. Of course, I don't spend much time off of Freenode, for all I know, other networks are the equivalent of crossroads chat or an IRC version of /b/!
vor_ 12y ago
The IRCv3 working group (http://ircv3.org http://ircv3.org), comprising server and client developers, continues to work on new features. The latest update is expected to be finalized around the end of March.
- lfowles 12y ago
  I was excited when there was talk about JSON capabilities. Hopefully it gets included eventually. (looks like it will be back on the table in 3.3+). https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/55 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/55 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/57 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/57
  - nenolod 12y ago
    We are planning to bring some experimental JSON-based transport for 3.3 which will allow us to eventually start transitioning to considering IRC events in an intermediate representation. The key thing is going to be getting the client authors to understand the benefits of this approach, as well as providing implementation of both the extended RFC1459 payload format and the JSON format. The eventual end game is to have a flag day and deprecate the legacy format, but this will probably take a few years to do.
xabi 12y ago
Here an old IRC addict :) /me also was the developer of XDCC http://xa.bi/files/irc/xdcc.3.3.0b.irc http://xa.bi/files/irc/xdcc.3.3.0b.irc Good old times!
- atmosx 12y ago
  Wow, nice! Never used ircII but used BitchX (famous spin-off)! Today I use "weechat", an enhanced version of 'irssi' while usually lagging on Freenode :-)
- apaprocki 12y ago
  Wow, kudos. I can't tell you how much time I spent using XDCC. Important part of my childhood right there :)
- sergers 12y ago
  Oh my... I love u man!. I was a little late to the irc game... Only started at 12.... 18 years ago. Loved mirc... Made tones of custom scripts I loved serving and getting files using xdcc from my fansubbing days. I dabbled in some warez, stayed strong when irc.cjb.net came under fire of massive ddos, and jumped many nodes... Always with trusty xdcc to serve our releases before bittorent (was hosting server since initial python torrent server release too)
DiabloD3 12y ago
I've been on IRC since 1991, that is 24 years. I am 31. I started when I was 7. I can't imagine the Internet without IRC.
- lfowles 12y ago
  Similarly, I remember using (PJIRC? ParrotIRC? Something like that from ~2000) to get on trivia game channels when I was in elementary school. Then, years later when I was getting into programming, I found out that this thing I've been using all along is a great resource for connecting with like minded people! The internet has been a social playground to me for almost as long as I've been exposed to it.
- zippergz 12y ago
  What are the good irc networks and channels these days? I haven't been on in many, many years. I used to mostly hand out on undernet.
  - snarfy 12y ago
    freenode
  - DiabloD3 12y ago
    The only major network worth hanging out on anymore is freenode, and thats the bulk of my autojoin channels.
  - ncza 12y ago
    Ha, that's like asking "which cities do you guys like". IRC is huge and has everything.
  - chronomex 12y ago
    There are some good spots on EFnet.
- aji 12y ago
  I've only been on IRC for 4 years and I can't imagine life without it. For me, it's become one of those constants I can rely on that's just always there wherever I go.
Arathorn 12y ago
IRC's longevity and appeal is fascinating - it seems like that the more constrained the bandwidth of communication, the more compact the configuration, and the more quirky and charismatic everyone's favourite clients (be they irssi, weechat, mIRC, xchat...) the more staying power a comms medium has. My workplace started off life ~15 years ago as a channel on a small student IRC network - the company effectively evolved out of IRC. The importance of IRC bots (be they eggdrops, or pircbot, or whatever) also seems to have become core to IRC culture - a well implemented IRC bot can be an incredibly powerful tool for glueing a community together. All this makes it incredibly hard when considering what could come after IRC, if anything. XMPP's MUCs just don't seem to have the same sticking power, and meanwhile things like Slack and HipChat come along and risk hijacking all our comms into closed silos rather than the relative openness of IRC and XMPP. Regardless, after 15 years of addiction to IRC we're having a go at coming up with something better that still has some of the same appeal. The project is called Matrix.org, and the main differences to IRC are: * Open federation; anyone can spin up a server and join in. * Conversation history (i.e. scrollback) is the main building block - a room's history is stored (partially or completely) over all the servers who are participating in a room. So there's no single point of control or failure. * Compulsory cryptographically signed message history (necessary due to the open federation) * Simple HTTP/JSON client-server API. (Server-server API is also HTTPS/JSON) * Store arbitrary structured data in the room - not just text messages. So you can use it for setting up VoIP calls; whiteboarding info; random device telemetry, or whatever. * Built-in distributed file storage (no more DCC, for better or worse) * Strong identity and end-to-end encryption (via a variant of Axolotl; currently in dev) * Support for 3rd party IDs - contact people based on their mail address, phone number, or whatever details folks chose to identify themselves by. So if you like IRC and are interested in a fairly radical alternative, please drop by http://matrix.org/beta http://matrix.org/beta and say hi. It's in early beta, but it's fairly usable - we have Android and iOS clients and SDKs for python, perl, iOS, Android and an increasingly active dev community. Also, it's not frozen yet, so now is a great chance to get involved and make sure we get it right :)
- laumars 12y ago
  The signed messages history and end-to-end encryption sounds interesting, but largely from a "how is this going to work in public rooms" perspective. IRC is largely a broadcast tool in the same sense that many social networks are. With IRC, you generally chat in open channels where anybody can join. While encryption protects against MITM, the privacy arguments are moot given the broadcast nature of public chat rooms. So to combine that with server-held scrollbacks, and I'm left really curious about your intended usage / benefits of end-to-end encryption. So if you would you mind discussing a little more detail about that aspect of your chat protocol, I'd certainly be very interested in reading it :)
slacko 12y ago
I study at the University of Oulu. The university museum has the machine that hosted the first IRC server :)
hernan604 12y ago
Here is a small list of famous projects from the common developer tools and their corresponding contact web pages that mention IRC plus where to find help and/or core developers of such projects. - Databases - mysql http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/irc.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/irc.html postgres http://www.postgresql.org/community/irc/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/irc/ firebird http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/news-portals/ http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/news-portals/ oracle http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/IRC http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/IRC * not oficial * - Virtualization - virtualbox https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/IRC https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/IRC vagrant https://www.vagrantup.com/support.html https://www.vagrantup.com/support.html - Languages - ruby https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/ https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/ python https://www.python.org/community/irc/ https://www.python.org/community/irc/ perl http://www.irc.perl.org/ http://www.irc.perl.org/ go https://golang.org/help/ https://golang.org/help/ - Editors - vim http://www.vim.org/community.php http://www.vim.org/community.php emacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InternetRelayChat http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InternetRelayChat - webservers - nginx http://wiki.nginx.org/Community http://wiki.nginx.org/Community apache http://httpd.apache.org/support.html http://httpd.apache.org/support.html - Linux distros - arch https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IRC_channel https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IRC_channel ubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList freebsd https://wiki.freebsd.org/IrcChannels https://wiki.freebsd.org/IrcChannels - Java - hibernate http://hibernate.org/community/ http://hibernate.org/community/ tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/irc.html http://tomcat.apache.org/irc.html - Window managers - i3 http://i3wm.org/contact/ http://i3wm.org/contact/ gnome https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC kde https://userbase.kde.org/IRC_Channels https://userbase.kde.org/IRC_Channels fluxbox http://fluxbox.org/help/ http://fluxbox.org/help/ - Broswers - opera http://irc.opera.com/ http://irc.opera.com/ chromium http://www.chromium.org/contact http://www.chromium.org/contact firefox https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC - Image Software - Gimp http://www.gimp.org/irc.html http://www.gimp.org/irc.html Inkscape https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/ https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/
snarfy 12y ago
If I recall correctly, a few PC games used irc code as the basis of there networking stack. irc2 script was what really got me into programming all those years ago. At one point I had VT100 codes spammed to the status line in order to draw blocks on the screen for an in chat tetris game drawn in ascii. I also managed to hack out of the sandbox the client was running in by setting the ENCRYPT_PROGRAM feature to /bin/sh. Good times.
api 12y ago
I wrote an Irc script called TextBox as a teenager. Among other things it was one of the first that could implement Irc bots via DCC RAW tcp connections from the script itself, allowing you to martial armies of channel takeover bots. Seemed cool when I was 15, and it was actually through Irc channel wars that I learned the basics of network protocol design.
- raldi 12y ago
  Holy shit! You're the guy who wrote textbox.irc?! /me bows (For those of you who didn't have shell accounts in 1994, this is like being the inventor of the AK-47 and the skateboard at the same time.)
  - api 12y ago
    Lol. Yeah, those were fun times. Old school IRC was basically a non stop CTF tournament. I wrote TextBox on a Linux 486 with kernel 0.99.15 I think, or maybe 1.0.x, and a shell account on a Sun SparcStation via a local ISP. http://adam.ierymenko.name/ye_olde_source_code.html http://adam.ierymenko.name/ye_olde_source_code.html That page has TextBox and also my first nontrivial c program, a nick collider.
TeaTea 12y ago
Great Article, Thanks.
ote 12y ago
Great Article, Thanks.
tiwul 12y ago
Great Article, Thanks.
schme 12y ago
Twitch chat is also running on top of IRC. You can connect to their irc servers and use the twitch chat from your irc client. With limited capabilities I might add (no private messages for one). More info: http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitch-irc http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitc...
notfoss 12y ago
Though there is no indication on the web page, the "Last Modified" tag says 4/29/2000, 4:45:46 PM. I believe that should be mentioned in the title of this post. Because the following text from the page felt misleading. "The first IRC server (and still running) was tolsun.oulu.fi .."

131 points by of 12y ago

bemmu 12y ago

IRC is awesome. The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In that important feature Twitter/Slack is superior. By the way, #startups on freenode seems to have the most HN users on it.

vertex-four 12y ago
> The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In my use of it - primarily social, less technical - this is actually a huge benefit. Whereas things I say on Facebook, on Twitter, even on Skype groups float around forever, this doesn't happen on IRC. Only the other people in the channel log things, and if someone else turns up, they don't see what I've been talking about - the exact contents of my discussions aren't floating about forever so long as people don't intentionally distribute them.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  This is also one of the (original) benefits of 4chan. It's not merely anonymous, but it is also ephemeral. However, these days there are IRC loggers and 4chan archivers.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    There's only IRC loggers that you can see, though - if you know (practically) everyone in a channel at a given point in time, you're reasonably safe - not 100%, but reasonably. Which is about good enough for most things.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    You guys know that probably every third person on Freenode has his or her own IRC bot on the channel? ;). Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I'm yet to see a popular channel that isn't logged either publicly or privately.
- ashark 12y ago
  IRC's one of the only things that makes me feel like the early web did. A bunch of mostly-anonymous people collaborating or just hanging out, and it doesn't seem like everyone's trying to make a buck or polish their "personal brand". Little or no official corporate presence. No one's worried anything they write will ruin their lives, justly or unjustly. It's the "no one knows you're a dog" web of yesteryear. I miss when more of the web was like that. It's nice.
  - mongol 12y ago
    Well put. It is quite different now.
- yborg 12y ago
  Most channel bots log, and most channels have bots to provide application services (like history searching). I have 5 continuous years of history for some of the channel bots I run. There used to be a bot that would try and join every public channel and produced a web-searchable archive of transcripts, I don't know if this is still running.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    Most channels I'm in don't have channel bots - one XKCD-related subchannel does (and it doesn't log), and the local hackspace's does (and it doesn't log either), but I'm in another half a dozen channels that don't.
pavel_lishin 12y ago
> IRC is awesome. The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In that important feature Twitter/Slack is superior. I use bip[1], which is an IRC bouncer. I basically connect to networks from a remote machine, and when I hop into IRC, I connect to that machine - which gives me some playback of what's been said beforehand, so I know at least some of the context. This doesn't solve the 'problem' for joining new channels, but it's nice if you have regular channels you hang out in. 1: https://bip.milkypond.org/ https://bip.milkypond.org/ (their cert is broken :/)
- iancarroll 12y ago
  ZNC is also a good bouncer (I use it).
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    I used znc for a bit, and switched to bip for ... some reason that I can't recall, now. I think the configuration for bip was easier than znc?
    - iancarroll 12y ago
      I don't find it hard. The webadmin module lets you configure everything via a web interface if you're inclined to.
Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
I think that comparing Twitter or Slack to IRC in that manner is a broken comparison. Neither of those services can possibly stand up next to IRC, an open protocol with several dozen client and server implementations and millions of users. IRC thrives because it's so open and easy to use from a programmer's point of view. There's no centralized authority or point of failure with IRC.
gghh 12y ago
About history: of course you can run your own IRC bouncer if you're willing to host it, but irccloud https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ is such a no-brain solution that more and more IRC users have it.
- toxicFork 12y ago
  Yep, I was making my own web based irc bouncer/client until I saw irccloud and my project was instantly dumped and I'm now gladly paying them!
- kapilvt 12y ago
  i'm a user... aware of irccloud since the extended beta, but recently a user due to various nesc. evils of corporate networking. except honestly the ui sucks for history and non existent search sucks compared to botbot.me ie. https://botbot.me/freenode/google-containers/ https://botbot.me/freenode/google-containers/ erlang vs python .. connected clients vs historical search.. apples and oranges i guess...
petercooper 12y ago
I've never implemented one, but surely an ircd could do this if it wanted to? When someone joins a channel, send them a certain number of lines of history straight away, etc?
- DasIch 12y ago
  The protocol provides no way to send a scrollback or a history of messages. Additionally messages have no timestamp, so you don't know when they were written, only when you received them.
  - ReidZB 12y ago
    I'm no IRC expert, but I do know that some IRCds do support sending a scrollback / channel history. For example, InspIRCd's chanhistory module: https://wiki.inspircd.org/Modules/2.0/chanhistory https://wiki.inspircd.org/Modules/2.0/chanhistory How it actually accomplishes that within the framework of the "protocol," I don't know.
    - scrollaway 12y ago
      The messages are sent as extra messages, duplicating timestamps and faking senders and overall it's pretty ugly. The Quassel protocol supports this, unfortunately it looks like the quassel team doesn't care about taking it further than where it is.
      - grawity 12y ago
        Timestamps – there's a standard extension for this (see IRCv3 above). ZNC has been using it for maybe a year. Senders – there's absolutely no reason to fake senders, since it was always valid for messages to come from people not in the channel.
      - SaberUK 12y ago
        Full disclosure: I am one of the developers on the aforementioned IRC server. In a future release InspIRCd will adopt support for the server-time extension which will allow us to get rid of the timestamp duplication if a user's client supports it.
klapinat0r 12y ago
https://botbot.me/ https://botbot.me/
raimue 12y ago
I consider not seeing the previous history a feature. When I say something to a group of people currently in a room, I only address these people and this message is not necessarily intended for anyone joining later.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

So, here's a fun historical detail. ISO 646[0] was a 7-bit character encoding, of which ASCII is a superset. It defined a common subset of characters that would always be available, leaving a few codepoints for local supersets to fill in. ASCII used some of those for punctuation, but Scandinavian character sets[1] filled them with extra lowercase and uppercase letters with diacritics. IRC came from Finland, so it was designed for those charsets. But the standard for the Internet is supposed to be ASCII, so what happens when you use those codes from ASCII that correspond to extra letters in the Scandinavian character sets? Take a look at RFC 1459:[2] Because of IRC's scandanavian origin, the characters {}| are considered to be the lower case equivalents of the characters []\, respectively. This is a critical issue when determining the equivalence of two nicknames. Cute, right? Try it, it actually works (at least on Freenode!). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#National_variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#National_variants [2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459 § 2.3

vor_ 12y ago
RFC 1459 left out ~ and ^, which are usually also case mapped.
- secure 12y ago
  But ~ is not a valid character in nicknames in the first place, according to RFC 1459, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-2.3.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-2.3.1: <nick> ::= <letter> { <letter> | <number> | <special> } <letter> ::= 'a' ... 'z' | 'A' ... 'Z' <number> ::= '0' ... '9' <special> ::= '-' | '[' | ']' | '\' | '`' | '^' | '{' | '}'
userbinator 12y ago
I wonder how they used programming languages which assign special meaning to those characters; use ASCII and the code looks fine but string constants with those characters will be very odd, use the local variant and the string constants look better but the code worse. foo[1] = "\r\n"; fooÄ1Å = "ÖrÖn"; Perhaps it's something you just get used to after a while. The standard QWERTY keyboard has a reversed form of this "caseness" , with lowercase being []\ and their "uppercase" shifted versions {}|.

Raphmedia 12y ago

Anyone else has the issue that every IRC channel seems dead? If I'm very lucky, I'll find an active channel, but it will die in about a month. Perhaps I am simply not looking in the right places.

ReidZB 12y ago
There are many large Freenode channels that don't appear to be dying any time soon, like #bash, #archlinux, ##linux, etc. (Though, just because they're large and not dying doesn't mean they're worth hanging out in. :) ) As a tip, on Freenode, you can message the Alis bot to list channels: /msg alis list *linux* The reply from Alis will include how many users are in channels whose names match linux. If it has >500 users, it probably isn't going anywhere any time soon. (You can do this for other topics that interest you, of course.)
- lfowles 12y ago
  It seems that many subreddits also have thriving IRC communities. See: #boardgames on Freenode, which probably has ~150 connected at any given time. So it's not only the big channels!
adventureloop 12y ago
The channel for my local hackerspace is quite active, but not so busy that you can't keep track of what is going on. I also loiter in some bsd channels that are reasonably active as well. It probably helps to find channels that have a purpose behind them.
ashmud 12y ago
These days, I only go to IRC when I have a specific purpose in mind. Some online groups [still] use it almost as a support channel. It [the way I use it now] is not like my days in uni when it was a popular form of "casual chat."
- lfowles 12y ago
  I'm still in many casual chat channels. The general topic ones are the best for this, not ones with a strict "Support/Devel for $PROJECT" mentality that shut down offtopic conversation immediately. It's also a matter of finding like minded individuals to chat with, which does seem harder than it was when I was in highschool a decade ago. Of course, I don't spend much time off of Freenode, for all I know, other networks are the equivalent of crossroads chat or an IRC version of /b/!

vor_ 12y ago

The IRCv3 working group (http://ircv3.org http://ircv3.org), comprising server and client developers, continues to work on new features. The latest update is expected to be finalized around the end of March.

lfowles 12y ago
I was excited when there was talk about JSON capabilities. Hopefully it gets included eventually. (looks like it will be back on the table in 3.3+). https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/55 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/55 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/57 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/57
- nenolod 12y ago
  We are planning to bring some experimental JSON-based transport for 3.3 which will allow us to eventually start transitioning to considering IRC events in an intermediate representation. The key thing is going to be getting the client authors to understand the benefits of this approach, as well as providing implementation of both the extended RFC1459 payload format and the JSON format. The eventual end game is to have a flag day and deprecate the legacy format, but this will probably take a few years to do.

xabi 12y ago

Here an old IRC addict :) /me also was the developer of XDCC http://xa.bi/files/irc/xdcc.3.3.0b.irc http://xa.bi/files/irc/xdcc.3.3.0b.irc Good old times!

atmosx 12y ago
Wow, nice! Never used ircII but used BitchX (famous spin-off)! Today I use "weechat", an enhanced version of 'irssi' while usually lagging on Freenode :-)
apaprocki 12y ago
Wow, kudos. I can't tell you how much time I spent using XDCC. Important part of my childhood right there :)
sergers 12y ago
Oh my... I love u man!. I was a little late to the irc game... Only started at 12.... 18 years ago. Loved mirc... Made tones of custom scripts I loved serving and getting files using xdcc from my fansubbing days. I dabbled in some warez, stayed strong when irc.cjb.net came under fire of massive ddos, and jumped many nodes... Always with trusty xdcc to serve our releases before bittorent (was hosting server since initial python torrent server release too)

DiabloD3 12y ago

I've been on IRC since 1991, that is 24 years. I am 31. I started when I was 7. I can't imagine the Internet without IRC.

lfowles 12y ago
Similarly, I remember using (PJIRC? ParrotIRC? Something like that from ~2000) to get on trivia game channels when I was in elementary school. Then, years later when I was getting into programming, I found out that this thing I've been using all along is a great resource for connecting with like minded people! The internet has been a social playground to me for almost as long as I've been exposed to it.
zippergz 12y ago
What are the good irc networks and channels these days? I haven't been on in many, many years. I used to mostly hand out on undernet.
- snarfy 12y ago
  freenode
- DiabloD3 12y ago
  The only major network worth hanging out on anymore is freenode, and thats the bulk of my autojoin channels.
- ncza 12y ago
  Ha, that's like asking "which cities do you guys like". IRC is huge and has everything.
- chronomex 12y ago
  There are some good spots on EFnet.
aji 12y ago
I've only been on IRC for 4 years and I can't imagine life without it. For me, it's become one of those constants I can rely on that's just always there wherever I go.

Arathorn 12y ago

IRC's longevity and appeal is fascinating - it seems like that the more constrained the bandwidth of communication, the more compact the configuration, and the more quirky and charismatic everyone's favourite clients (be they irssi, weechat, mIRC, xchat...) the more staying power a comms medium has. My workplace started off life ~15 years ago as a channel on a small student IRC network - the company effectively evolved out of IRC. The importance of IRC bots (be they eggdrops, or pircbot, or whatever) also seems to have become core to IRC culture - a well implemented IRC bot can be an incredibly powerful tool for glueing a community together. All this makes it incredibly hard when considering what could come after IRC, if anything. XMPP's MUCs just don't seem to have the same sticking power, and meanwhile things like Slack and HipChat come along and risk hijacking all our comms into closed silos rather than the relative openness of IRC and XMPP. Regardless, after 15 years of addiction to IRC we're having a go at coming up with something better that still has some of the same appeal. The project is called Matrix.org, and the main differences to IRC are: * Open federation; anyone can spin up a server and join in. * Conversation history (i.e. scrollback) is the main building block - a room's history is stored (partially or completely) over all the servers who are participating in a room. So there's no single point of control or failure. * Compulsory cryptographically signed message history (necessary due to the open federation) * Simple HTTP/JSON client-server API. (Server-server API is also HTTPS/JSON) * Store arbitrary structured data in the room - not just text messages. So you can use it for setting up VoIP calls; whiteboarding info; random device telemetry, or whatever. * Built-in distributed file storage (no more DCC, for better or worse) * Strong identity and end-to-end encryption (via a variant of Axolotl; currently in dev) * Support for 3rd party IDs - contact people based on their mail address, phone number, or whatever details folks chose to identify themselves by. So if you like IRC and are interested in a fairly radical alternative, please drop by http://matrix.org/beta http://matrix.org/beta and say hi. It's in early beta, but it's fairly usable - we have Android and iOS clients and SDKs for python, perl, iOS, Android and an increasingly active dev community. Also, it's not frozen yet, so now is a great chance to get involved and make sure we get it right :)

laumars 12y ago
The signed messages history and end-to-end encryption sounds interesting, but largely from a "how is this going to work in public rooms" perspective. IRC is largely a broadcast tool in the same sense that many social networks are. With IRC, you generally chat in open channels where anybody can join. While encryption protects against MITM, the privacy arguments are moot given the broadcast nature of public chat rooms. So to combine that with server-held scrollbacks, and I'm left really curious about your intended usage / benefits of end-to-end encryption. So if you would you mind discussing a little more detail about that aspect of your chat protocol, I'd certainly be very interested in reading it :)

slacko 12y ago

I study at the University of Oulu. The university museum has the machine that hosted the first IRC server :)

hernan604 12y ago

Here is a small list of famous projects from the common developer tools and their corresponding contact web pages that mention IRC plus where to find help and/or core developers of such projects. - Databases - mysql http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/irc.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/irc.html postgres http://www.postgresql.org/community/irc/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/irc/ firebird http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/news-portals/ http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/news-portals/ oracle http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/IRC http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/IRC * not oficial * - Virtualization - virtualbox https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/IRC https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/IRC vagrant https://www.vagrantup.com/support.html https://www.vagrantup.com/support.html - Languages - ruby https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/ https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/ python https://www.python.org/community/irc/ https://www.python.org/community/irc/ perl http://www.irc.perl.org/ http://www.irc.perl.org/ go https://golang.org/help/ https://golang.org/help/ - Editors - vim http://www.vim.org/community.php http://www.vim.org/community.php emacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InternetRelayChat http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InternetRelayChat - webservers - nginx http://wiki.nginx.org/Community http://wiki.nginx.org/Community apache http://httpd.apache.org/support.html http://httpd.apache.org/support.html - Linux distros - arch https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IRC_channel https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IRC_channel ubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList freebsd https://wiki.freebsd.org/IrcChannels https://wiki.freebsd.org/IrcChannels - Java - hibernate http://hibernate.org/community/ http://hibernate.org/community/ tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/irc.html http://tomcat.apache.org/irc.html - Window managers - i3 http://i3wm.org/contact/ http://i3wm.org/contact/ gnome https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC kde https://userbase.kde.org/IRC_Channels https://userbase.kde.org/IRC_Channels fluxbox http://fluxbox.org/help/ http://fluxbox.org/help/ - Broswers - opera http://irc.opera.com/ http://irc.opera.com/ chromium http://www.chromium.org/contact http://www.chromium.org/contact firefox https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC - Image Software - Gimp http://www.gimp.org/irc.html http://www.gimp.org/irc.html Inkscape https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/ https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/

snarfy 12y ago

If I recall correctly, a few PC games used irc code as the basis of there networking stack. irc2 script was what really got me into programming all those years ago. At one point I had VT100 codes spammed to the status line in order to draw blocks on the screen for an in chat tetris game drawn in ascii. I also managed to hack out of the sandbox the client was running in by setting the ENCRYPT_PROGRAM feature to /bin/sh. Good times.

api 12y ago

I wrote an Irc script called TextBox as a teenager. Among other things it was one of the first that could implement Irc bots via DCC RAW tcp connections from the script itself, allowing you to martial armies of channel takeover bots. Seemed cool when I was 15, and it was actually through Irc channel wars that I learned the basics of network protocol design.

raldi 12y ago
Holy shit! You're the guy who wrote textbox.irc?! /me bows (For those of you who didn't have shell accounts in 1994, this is like being the inventor of the AK-47 and the skateboard at the same time.)
- api 12y ago
  Lol. Yeah, those were fun times. Old school IRC was basically a non stop CTF tournament. I wrote TextBox on a Linux 486 with kernel 0.99.15 I think, or maybe 1.0.x, and a shell account on a Sun SparcStation via a local ISP. http://adam.ierymenko.name/ye_olde_source_code.html http://adam.ierymenko.name/ye_olde_source_code.html That page has TextBox and also my first nontrivial c program, a nick collider.

TeaTea 12y ago

Great Article, Thanks.

ote 12y ago

Great Article, Thanks.

tiwul 12y ago

Great Article, Thanks.

schme 12y ago

Twitch chat is also running on top of IRC. You can connect to their irc servers and use the twitch chat from your irc client. With limited capabilities I might add (no private messages for one). More info: http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitch-irc http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitc...

notfoss 12y ago

Though there is no indication on the web page, the "Last Modified" tag says 4/29/2000, 4:45:46 PM. I believe that should be mentioned in the title of this post. Because the following text from the page felt misleading. "The first IRC server (and still running) was tolsun.oulu.fi .."