
IRC necromancy - beefhash
https://virtuallyfun.com/2017/11/18/irc-necromancy/
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xabi
XDCC original author here. Nice to read this kind of stuff!

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Asooka
Thank you! I've downloaded so much stuff via XDCC that wasn't available in
torrent form, or even sold anywhere.

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rhave
Oh, memories. We also made a lightweight channel service to take the load off
of Q. I think it was a little before newserv came into production. We designed
it over generous amounts of whisky in a suburb to Stockholm. It's on github
([https://github.com/quakenet/lightweight](https://github.com/quakenet/lightweight)).

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fapjacks
For trivia, which suburb?

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rhave
Sorry, I honestly can't remember. I'm pretty sure I was drinking Chivas Regal
though.

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lowglow
I think the author, Neozeed, is the person back in the day when I asked them
to teach me how to "hack", they instead taught me what telnet was and that
there was a larger network beyond AOL. It lead me to what I am today. Thanks.

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scruffyherder
Unixgod? Lol long long time ago. ...

But I'm just hosting this post, it's not mine. The rest of the blog ramblings
are.

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lowglow
It was SOOOO Long ago I don't even remember my handle back then. That was a
long time ago. What are you up to now?

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scruffyherder
Changed jobs a few times, changed cities, then continents and then finally
settled down. But I'm much older than you!

Started a blog over 10 years ago as a place to record my crazy experiments and
to remember obsolete stuff. Not that I think many people care about ancient
Unix, Novell or OS/2... I never really have much time to go back to the old
chat.taucher.net thing... With the wife / kids / work it's hard to find the
time.

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lowglow
Can I just email you through your site? Is there contact info there?

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scruffyherder
I have a really unique email..

Neozeed .AT. gmail.com

When Gmail went public I thought we were all doing aliases, meanwhile everyone
went with real names for some reason. And some Australian football player with
the same name and his rabid fans grabbed all the variations of mine... Oh
well.

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jaequery
irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode
perhaps even dead.

so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there.
slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different
purpose.

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LocutusOfBorges
Discord, overwhelmingly.

Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump.
It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people
clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons.

I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The
barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the
feature set's extremely limited, etc. Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground
and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two
years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to
stroll in and snatch up.

Discord provides seamless cloud message logging, mobile notifications,
intuitive clients, a huge ecosystem of easy-to-use bots, and integration with
games that just works without the user having to set anything up. Even non-
gaming-related communities have been switching to it for convenience's sake.

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astrobe_
> The barrier to entry's too high

I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One
literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if
you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them
easily (if your client lacks in the _help_ area).

> the feature set's extremely limited

I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large set
of features? Is the value of a program measured by the number of features it
has?

> Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards
> creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have
> had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up

Apples and oranges. Discord did have serious opponents named Teamspeak, Skype,
Mumble and other VOIP clients - but certainly not IRC. And if my memory
serves, the first thing they did was to make sure to dislodge those programs
from the gamers community.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
I’ve been a software engineer for several years now and I still have trouble
with MiRC and Adium. I tried Irssi and eventually gave up with it. The problem
with IRC is that even the “simple” clients never just work. There’s always
some little infuriating quirks that you have to dive super deep into configs
to figure out if it’s even possible to resolve without some sort of PR to the
repository.

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YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
These kinds of comments almost make me not want to live on this Earth any
more.

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astrobe_
Most comments really just say:

 _" IRC is like email. An old boring tool that just does its job. I'm not
having fun with it, I'm not feeling special when using, so I need a 'modern'
alternative."_

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debaserab2
I don't think what these comments are saying at all. IRC didn't do it's job
well, that's why it was replaced.

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james_a_craig
I'm also known as MadHacker, and I'm the original author of one of the other Q
variants on the list (Q3). It's good to see people still interested in the
history of IRC, especially as it seems to be slowly dying, sadly. I've spoken
to the author about the various sets of source code for QuakeNet's services,
but the versions linked are the best we can find just now. If there's anyone
out there with old copies of any of the Q variants, it'd be good to hear from
you. \-- MadHacker@quakenet

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teddyh
More like “IRC bot archeology”.

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irq
Perhaps, but it’s a network services bot, which is very much a part of most
IRC networks. Did you know they connect to the network as a server, not as a
regular client like most irc bots?

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vldr
I love trips down the memory lane to, what I call "the old internet" (before
facebook etc), like this.

I also had to check if "my" bot was involved somehow. I wrote a C-bot called
VladBot in the early 90's, stopped working on it somewhere in '97 but it's
seen all kinds of reincarnations (good and bad) since then.

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jlgaddis

      # Appears as ANNA

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app4soft
XKCD has cool comic[1] about IRC.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

