
IRC turns thirty - worez
http://www.oulu.fi/university/node/54247
======
tapland
Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main
social communication with others online.

It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It
requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content
filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since
it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lack of
bells and whistles turn a lot of people away from it.

~~~
pen2l
> current toxicity of social media

The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat”

IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan
is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC
seem to be out to kill people’s spirit.

There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated,
but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing) it is not for the
faint hearted.

~~~
lrvick
Sounds like you might be blaming a protocol for some poor channel choices.

There are still plenty of educational/social IRC communities that welcome
curious people of all skill levels.

I can vouch for [https://hashbang.sh](https://hashbang.sh)
(irc.hashbang.sh/6697) which has piles of industry leaders as regulars that
prefer investing in open federated standards for internet communication over
the endless array of hip walled garden flavor of the week chat systems.

We give out free bouncers/shells to anyone too :)

~~~
dmos62
I concur. I've learned a lot listening and participating in chat rooms, but
not all of them are the same. Some are definitely toxic, some are uplifting --
intellectually or otherwise. My personal recipe is once I have a topic in
mind, I browse through the channel list, filtering by popularity. In my
experience, "toxicity", for the lack of a better term, is proportional to
popularity (crowdedness) and mainstreamness. In practical terms, if a channel
has a lot of members (150+) that's not a good sign. If it's also a mainstream
topic, that's a definite red flag. In my case, I would consider joining that
channel a waste of time and energy. If I'm interested in a mainstream topic,
sorting the channels by user count will quickly reveal where people go to
escape the madness; as channels get big and sickly the interesting and helpful
people tend to go to one of the sattelite channels that don't have those
problems. As an example, the best channel on Python I found for my purposes
had ~5-15 active users per day. I'm especially happy with IRC, because I am
intrinsically drawn to more obscure technologies and their channels don't have
these problems.

That said, IRC is made by the communities using it. The only, but a
significant technological advantage it has over other chat mediums is its
minimalism. Barebones chat is much more conducive to technical discussions,
than the bloated alternatives, and I think the same applies for other kinds of
discussions as well.

------
donatj
If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC
with Telnet.

You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's
all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open
protocol should be.

Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

~~~
sbjs
I tried it before and it's not as easy as it sounds. There is no one spec,
it's a handful of RFCs and other ad hoc extensions that are barely documented
anywhere. I think there's at least a dozen different documents you have to
refer to.

~~~
sshine
For most of the client protocol, it's just RFC 1459 and RFC 2812. Then there's
CTCP, DCC, server-to-server protocols and the 005 numeric.

I'm not sure you need any of these for communicating via telnet or writing a
small bot that will answer back.

~~~
quietbritishjim
I tried to implement an IRC client in about 2004 and no popular server was
implementing RFC 2812, which was released in 2000. I realise that's a long
time ago but things move slowly in the IRC world, so I would be surprised if
things had changed a lot since then.

~~~
caf
RFC2812 was codifying one particular network's protocol choices and was never
accepted by the wider community of IRC server and client developers.

There _have_ been widely implemented improvements (eg RPL_ISUPPORT / 005)
which succeeded by discussion and consensus rather than trying to lay down a
new standard by fiat.

------
subhro
I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die
already".

No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy
slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack
client.

~~~
CookieMon
Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user?

kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at
[https://kiwiirc.com/](https://kiwiirc.com/)). To my untrained eye it _looks_
slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw
is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.

~~~
rakoo
The UI is the easiest thing to fix and as you have shown already has been for
some time. What separates IRC and the rest is all the features you would
expect by default in a messenger of the 21st century:

\- history

\- with search

\- logins

\- simple bots

\- automatic content fetching (wiki/youtube Links, pics and gifs)

\- file transfers that just work

\- image pasting

\- message editing

And probably others. Yes, those features exist in one way or another in IRC.
The point is not whether you can or not; the point is how much time and energy
do I want to spend to install _and maintain_ those. I may have had the
patience to do it a few years back, but I value other things now.

~~~
caf
As a sidebar, from what I can tell the term "bot" for an automated agent
accessible through chat originated on IRC.

~~~
rakoo
For sure, credit where it's due. However IRC doesn't beat the ease of
installation that Slack providers for bots.

------
cambalache
It is refreshing to still use a technology which mainly has not been tainted
with current crap (share, like, subscribe). You have to deal with some mods on
power-trips, but it is rare. Happy thirty!

------
dewey
The communities around torrent tracker was and is always very active on IRC as
having your own IRC network is pretty standard for a tracker. I probably spent
the majority of my time during my studies on IRC, and because of timezones it
was mostly during the night. I have very fond memories of this time and I'm a
bit sad that I don't use it that much any more.

I really can't wrap my head around how communities, especially for programming
languages use Slack where all the information gets fed into some silo and is
not publicly available. Especially if they don't pay for it, which most open
source projects don't do for money reasons and the history gets wiped after a
while. If I were to decide what to use in a company I'd probably go for
[https://www.irccloud.com/](https://www.irccloud.com/) \- it's an open
protocol but still has the convenience of not having to set up a bouncer and
run your own IRC server.

------
josteink
And the IRC network I help run must have turned 15 by now.

It’s not filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of users. It’s not
monetizable.

But instead we have a nice, small community where we can hang out, be
ourselves and do whatever we like without having to adhere some other
company’s “community standards”.

It’s how I like the internet to be, and I don’t care one bit if it’s old-
fashioned.

------
yeukhon
I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to
go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in
helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main
online network.

~~~
dmitriid
You’re conflating technology and community.

~~~
modells
Design brought forth, intentionally or not, creates everything but the content
of the experience. It's the "view" that people see that creates most of the
UX.

------
keithnz
very cool. I started with IRC circa 92, on a VAX VMS system after discovering
it using Gopher :)

Was great, though very addictive. The internet wasn't very well known, and not
many people were online, and it was very common to make friends all around the
world. I travelled and met a lot of people all over the world through IRC. I
remember quite a number of people starting relationships and having babies (
many of which would be late 20s now... crazy).

I remember in 93 when tanks were rolling into moscow getting live updates from
people who were there. Was a glimpse of the future yet to come around major
world events.

Slowly more and more people started turning up on IRC, new IRC networks
appeared, people started to perfer networking with people in their local
country or local state.... then later mostly people in their local city.

Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat
software.

~~~
ntnn
> Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat
> software.

That's news to me and the ~eight IRC networks I'm on.

~~~
WilliamEdward
With how many members? Even the most niche discord channels will likely have
more users than your 8 IRC channels.

~~~
dole
networks, not channels

------
gt565k
ahhh IRC

It brought me the joys of learning how to program while trying to write some
tcl scripts for eggdrop bots and goofing around in a shell setting up said
bot.

Every time I think of IRC I get this nostalgic feeling of the good old times
when communities were vibrant. It was so much easier to just hop on gamesurge
or quakenet and find people to game with, organize pugs, find random channels
where you can discuss things that interest you, and of course your favorite
local's city mingle spot.

I made some good friends from my local city's IRC channel in the early 2000s
that I still talk to this day.

I feel as though communities aren't as strong as they used to be as IRC has
been slowly losing its population. It just had this quick and fluid way of
hopping channels and finding people with similar interests. Listing all of the
channels with their user count, and seeing what's popular, or even creating
your own channel and community was so empowering.

~~~
paulie_a
Irc was awesome, efnet was particularly fun as a teenager. Forcing network
splits, installing eggdrop bots to take over a channel. Efnet was the wild
west where basically anything was okay. Dalnet was more civilized. Undernet
was definitely for warez.

I wonder if anyone ever paid for a mirc license in those days.

~~~
nexxer
Back when I was much more active on Undernet and EFNet, there was talk of 1-2
people actually having paid for an mIRC license.

Personally, a couple years ago I found the latest nagging screen guilt-trippy
enough that I paid for a license even though I rarely use it.

~~~
Toenex
Same people bagged themselves a WinZip license too I'll bet!

------
xvilka
It is worth noting that IRC is in the middle of overhaul and upgrade with
IRCv3 [1] standard. Sadly not many clients and servers support it (almost none
of them).

[1] [https://www.ircv3.net](https://www.ircv3.net)

~~~
eahman09
It is worth nothing that IRCv3 is a coup d'etat made by a closed coven of
developers:

Most IRC clients are slowly developed or almost dead these days; the modus
operandi of the IRCv3 developers is that they write patches for those IRC
clients to support IRCv3 features and then push hard for the maintainers of
those clients to merge them ("this is what the future of irc looks like! it's
what the other clients are implementing! do you wanna be the only one not
implementing it???")

They argue the development of their "standards" is open, but the truth is that
nobody cares about it (most people are OK with IRC as it is now) so very few
people contribute; they pretend that nobody complaining is a tacit agreement
that everybody is OK with their changes, when that's far from the truth.

~~~
dcbadacd
To be fair the protocol was on in my opinion life support and IRCv3 really
gives a few more years to the protocol and clients.

Actually, I still think most IRC clients stale as f __* even with IRCv3, for
example embedding images and videos in chats should be trivial but I 've yet
to see a Linux desktop client do it (without sacrificing other features).
IRCv3 doesn't also fix client certificate updating, though neither does any
client handle client certs nicely so it's a sweet dream of mine to see auto-
updated client certs.

------
sysashi
I feel like we will end up with another program that abstracts
Slack/Telegram/IRC into neat CLI interface and we will go full circle again.
:)

Happy birth day IRC!

~~~
walrus01
Until they recently shut it down (boooooo), it was possible to bridge a
company Slack channel into IRC and vice versa.

[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sla...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=slack+irc+bridge&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

~~~
no_protocol
My Discord <-> IRC <-> Slack <-> Matrix bridge with Matterbridge [0] still
works as of today, I didn't notice anything being shut down.

[0]:
[https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge](https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge)

------
asdojasdosadsa
IRC brings back some memories. I haven't personally used IRC in a few years
directly, but I can remember how when I started university, every freshman
"had" to login to IRC through SSH and screen :-). That's where the course
channels were sitting and you could get help, either if you didn't want to ask
face to face, go to school or just needed to ask something. There were other
channels too, some where you were invited and had small social groups you
chatted with daily.

Nowadays, most of the communication has migrated to Telegram from IRC.

EDIT: If one was to start using IRC, I guess there isn't a channel or a server
where most or some of the people using also Hacker News go?

~~~
pingec
Perhaps #hackernews and #startups on freenode?

~~~
Doxin
Another good starting point is #xkcd. it is a _large_ channel with a lot of
tech-ish and math-y people.

EDIT: Note that channel discovery on IRC is largely a word-of-mouth thing so
don't be shy to ask people for channel recommendations on irc. Most
programming language have a dedicated channel, e.g. #D or #python or whatnot.

~~~
schindlabua
Are you talking about freenode? I just joined #xkcd and it's 8 people and no
topic set. 3 other users joined and immediately left, I guess those were from
HN aswell.

(A big channel for everyone to join is ##programming, by the way.)

~~~
Doxin
Ah I should have specified. sorry. It's at irc.foonetic.net

------
VectorLock
Somebody unearthed an IRC server in the hinterlands of the intranet of the
huge tech company I work for. There was nobody there.

The company is big on Jabber though...

~~~
Jaruzel
When I worked for an international bank during the late 90s and early 2000s
they had a global IRC network on their internal WAN.

It was heavily used by all staff, which was fairly unique compared to the
other banks at the time.

Over time the bank developed their own dedicated client for it, and added
extensions to the servers for audit logging and username/realname enforcement,
and then eventually spun the department developing the tech off into it's own
startup company that then sold the product to other banks and companies. That
spin off company is still around selling online collaboration software.

------
protomyth
If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also,
any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?

~~~
unimpressive
For Windows I always use Hexchat, which seems to be the _only_ decent open
source client for Windows. If anyone would like to jump in and point out
others I don't know about, by all means.

(Heck, it's what I use on Linux too)

~~~
detaro
I really like Quassel. It's main model is client-server (you install the
server component somewhere and it'll stay online, bouncer-like, and you can
connect to it from multiple clients), but you can use it in a standalone mode
too. The main client runs Linux/Windows/Mac, there's one for Android too.

------
mabynogy
IRC is simple and efficient. It's a real pleasure for me to use it daily to
talk to my fellow programmers. Yeah we don't have images but we have links and
a pastebin
([https://github.com/solusipse/fiche](https://github.com/solusipse/fiche)) to
replace that.

I'm on #dailyprog at irc.rizon.net
([https://dailyprog.org/](https://dailyprog.org/)). It's an irc-based
programming community. We also share a server with ssh access.

We do small programming projects together. At the moment the idea is to make
an exhausive list of all existing IRC servers with massscan and nmap (the
output of the running massscan instance: [https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-
servers.txt](https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt)).

------
schindlabua
I always envy the guy who registered the nick "e" on freenode. He must be
ancient, one of the first users since NickServ came into being, and I imagine
him as this grey-bearded programmer wizard who speaks in x86 assembly. He
hangs around in ##C and I've seen him speak occasionally I think.

------
dakom
IRC was where I learned to program in the late 90's. Both through instruction
on channels like #C, and also literally implementing the RFC's - building both
bots and servers.

It was a rush building "bot/server" combos like Nickserv... felt like
superpowers and you could do all kinds of things through spoofing names and
whatnot.

(I mean it was pointless since the only servers I could pair with were other
empty ones with one or two people... but still - it was fun!)

I guess at some point my trajectory just.. changed - moving from that world to
less heady stuff like Flash and so on... but the nostalgia is strong and I
feel very lucky to have gotten my start in tech that way.

------
triviatise
I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem
poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players,
many of them asked to play for real money. People created graphical clients
and another guy extended the code to add tournament rules.

Apparently poker pro chris ferguson first started playing poker on IRC.

I definitely missed a huge opportunity to monetize it.

IRC these days is a bit of a mess with custom authentication protocols that
make it too hard to use. Slack is extremely easy to setup for an organization
and just works.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Here's to the next thirty years! There's no better way to chat online than
IRC. You'll have to tear it from our cold, dead hands.

------
fouc
Has anyone noticed that Slack communities are a lot less active these days?

And IRC communities are less active these days.

Where are the chatters going to now?

~~~
iliaznk
Not sure whether Slack communities are less or more active, but what I'm sure
is that chatting hardly works as a means to convey knowledge. It's neither
rewarding nor persistent. I mean, you spend your time for free answering some
(usually) easy to google questions and soon your answer is lost in the
countless logs and you have no way to refer to it later like it never
happened.

All popular and large Slack communities (the same is true for IRC channels) I
used to be a member of are very much alike – hundreds of people just sit there
busy with their lives just in case somebody would post something interesting,
and just occasionally there're small bursts of activity to educate another
newbie who did @here in the channel. And even when (oh, miracle) there does
occur some conversation you realise you have no time to follow it as it
happens and later you're just to lazy to find it and try to make some sense
out of it. So, first you turn off notification distractions. And second, after
a while, you realise you haven't poked there for weeks and finally just remove
it with no regret.

------
walrus01
A CLI for a workstation without irssi on it is no workstation at all.

------
kilon
I was never a fan of IRC although I am still a part time user since 1995. I
was always annoyed losing replies just because I went offline and of course
all the weird self disconnects and occasional banning bots. Sending files was
also a big pain. But was simple to use and with tons of communities so I never
actively complained about it. I converted to Discord and never looked back. On
the other hand I was never deep into social activity online.

------
crtasm
Smart filtering of join/part messages makes irc so much nicer to use,
available in my preferred client Weechat as well as Hexchat and surely others.

I only see a join/part if it happens within x minutes of someone speaking, and
there's a shortcut to switch to unfiltered view when I want it.

------
nullify88
Would anyone know of any active communities for sysadmins on IRC or otherwise?
Or a directory to find such channels?

Never really been one for being involved in online communities but being a one
man team at work has got me looking for people of similar interests.

~~~
crtasm
You can search Freenode's channel list at
[http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode](http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode)

I've noticed a #reddit-sysadmin , likely there's a ##sysadmin too and probably
others. The double # indicates a topic
[https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces](https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces)

------
lx3459683
For anyone wondering where IRC users have migrated these days, the answer is
Discord.

There are several programming-themed servers with thousands of concurrent
users, and many more high population servers for other interest groups.

------
agumonkey
You could take away the web 2.0 I may not bother. IRC on the other hand ...

------
mxuribe
I remember back in 1992 (my freshmen year of college), my first exposure to
this thing called the internet was via email AND irc. Ah, good ol' irc; what
wonderful memories! Happy birthday irc!

------
bkircher
Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?

~~~
louiz
It might seem weird, and probably will not please everyone, but in my
experience, using an XMPP client (Conversations) along with biboumi (an XMPP
<-> IRC bridge, [https://biboumi.louiz.org](https://biboumi.louiz.org) (note:
I'm the author)) is the best way to use IRC on mobile:

\- You can idle in the channels without doing hundreds of part/join when your
phone loses the connection

\- You get the full backlog of what was said while your phone was offline

And you can host just one biboumi instance for all your users. You can even
configure it to connect to just one IRC server. The users just have to join
channels like #nodejs@irc.myxmppserver.com

~~~
bremensaki
This is exactly what I do - I use Conversations and biboumi to idle in a bunch
of channels for various projects I'm watching.

Thanks louiz! You do good work!

------
dcow
Barely 30 and all the cool kids have already moved on... I think there's a
metaphore in there somewhere.

------
rhlala
My issue with irc is everyone can see your ip adress right?

Is there any chanel of hackernewsers with the same spirit as HN?

~~~
Doxin
That depends somewhat. Freenode for example allows you to request a "cloak" to
hide your IP as long as you're a) registered, b) not using the web client.

~~~
crtasm
And to their credit they still allow Tor connections, albeit to an existing
registered account and authenticating with key-based SASL.

------
yawz
I heavily used IRC in the early and mid 90s. Glad to see that it’s alive and
kicking. Happy 30th!

------
davidw
It's interesting that it's actually older than the "World Wide Web".

------
lcnmrn
Superthread, [https://superthread.net/](https://superthread.net/) is a web
based alternative to IRC. You might want to check it out.

------
fuzzyoneuk
I've met some great people and fellow Devs on efnet back in the day, it used
to be pretty much my only socialising back in the late 90s, some really
disturbing toxic people too but a great experience all together.

Still pop in every now and then.

------
anfilt
Long live IRC!

------
dagenix
/me slow claps

------
modells
Interesting. Last IIRC, Stanford ITS used tinyfugue (tf) MUD which is sorta
like IRC.

------
Karrot_Kream
For those that just want to use Slack through your IRC clients/bots/whatever,
take a look at
[https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya](https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya)

