Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 254 posts

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#191

Post by netwanderer3 »

beefhash wrote: post #163
dijit wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are vanity vhosts and there are cloaks. Cloaks apply uniformally but will not mask the last bit of your reversed hostname. So it might leak info about your ISP or region but not your full IP. What you stated is true of vanity vhosts though. Which will mask the whole record only if you’re logged in. :)

I think this is a split in terminology, actually. IRCds such as InspIRCd and UnrealIRCd speak of cloaks in the sense of user mode +x, commonly set on connection, which scrambles an incoming user's hostname/IP address to e.g. hidden-5npgt1.iinet.net.au or hidden-qjia2j.ncp0.j4h4.014d.2804.IP. Freenode, nota bene the largest IRC network right now, uses cloaks to instead refers to a special format of vHost[1]. It does n…

Back in the days I had to pay extra for a bnc/bouncer service (similar to a proxy), now most IRC networks offer vhost automatically, but I assume it's a bit less secured since the IRC networks themselves still know your real IP address.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#194

Post by swalls »

swozey wrote: post #127

I started using IRC around age, I dunno, 10-12 (30s now), lots of efnet then freenode, at one point I was an ircop until our childish antics got our server desynced. I don't use it anymore. Between the insular cliques and the fact that I can look up archives of 20-25 year old messages I wrote on there because you never know who or where someone is writing logs really turned me off as I got older. I'm in a few communi…

This is what terrifies me about Discord, as well as the fact they store all their logs in plaintext. AFAIK it is impossible to delete logs in Discord and any new user joining a channel gets access to all the back history of chat, so it's even worse than IRC.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#195

Post by aidenn0 »

jotm wrote: post #188
dijit wrote: post #15

Every day, It's become a social network of sorts for geeks, despite the age of the protocol I still find it the least "invasive" and most friendly experience, but that's probably because I spent the time configuring a client that's nice for me. (preview: http://imgs.fyi/img/9ve2.png ) I run a network even, called darkscience and it's available at irc.darkscience.net (TLS only on port 6697) the lobby is #darkscience i…

I wonder where you host it? Every other hosting provider does not allow IRC servers, what a shame.

I've not run into too many issues with IRC servers being blocked, but nothing is going to block IRC over SSL running on a non-standard port anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#196

Post by jotm »

LinuxBender wrote: post #190
jotm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where you host it? Every other hosting provider does not allow IRC servers, what a shame.

I've never run across a VPS or dedicated server provider that blocked inbound IRC. What providers prevented you from running an ircd?

This was a long time ago (7-10 years), but 1and1, Hetzner, OVH, HostGator, LiquidWeb did not allow IRC hosting. They were the cheapest, tbf. I only use Linode now, haven't looked into it.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#197

Post by dijit »

grep_name wrote: post #186
dijit wrote: post #15

Every day, It's become a social network of sorts for geeks, despite the age of the protocol I still find it the least "invasive" and most friendly experience, but that's probably because I spent the time configuring a client that's nice for me. (preview: http://imgs.fyi/img/9ve2.png ) I run a network even, called darkscience and it's available at irc.darkscience.net (TLS only on port 6697) the lobby is #darkscience i…

I'm interested in hearing more about how you've configured your client, do you have a repo or anything? Have you included plugins or add-ins from outside sources? Edit: Just saw your other comment, I'll check out your setup later this week! I find that what I want out of a chat client is something that can easily idle in the background and beep at me if someone @'s my username, with a way to handle missed messages, b…

I think this is a fair ask, unfortunately I made my setup for me and it's not exactly designed to be packaged/reused, but I linked my configs (in tarball format) here: https://0x0.st/zl_O.tbz2

What you're requesting is actually the normal way most of the people I talk to use IRC. I have a highlight buffer[0] script which keeps a history of all the times I get mentioned, and weechat supports libnotify so if your desktop is able to get pop-ups then you will be notified on highlight. (I use dunst for this).

There are also Quake-like terminal emulators that drop down on hotkey- these are also quite common and can make it really easy to just check what's going on when you have a spare second.

I will write a blog post about how to achieve my setup for linux users since there seems to have been mild interest. And I'll do some work on packaging it up so it's easy to take the bits that people like. I am using a fair number of plugins though.

this is what I have loaded (they are all on the weechat scripts site, just google the filename and "weechat):

  perl/autoload/:
  bashorg.pl@  colorize_lines.pl@  notify_send.pl@  sysinfo.pl@
  beep.pl      highmon.pl@         perlexec.pl@     volumeter.pl

  python/autoload/:
  autosort.py@   colorize_nicks.py@  fullwidth.py@  otr.py@      ws_replace.py@  zncplayback.py@
  bandwidth.py@  edit.py             go.py@         urlgrab.py@  xfer_setip.py@
  chanop.py@     emoji2alias.py@     ichatts.py@    vimode.py@   zncnotice.py@

  ruby/autoload/:
  mpdspam.rb@
[0]: https://weechat.org/scripts/source/highmon.pl.html/

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#198

Post by dijit »

LinuxBender wrote: post #190
jotm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where you host it? Every other hosting provider does not allow IRC servers, what a shame.

I've never run across a VPS or dedicated server provider that blocked inbound IRC. What providers prevented you from running an ircd?

Even if it's not blocked it is discouraged or against ToS for a fair number of places (including our current provider, tilaa). However I asked specifically for an exemption because we've been around for nearly 20 years at this point.

Most cloud providers (GCE, AWS, Azure) don't seem to mind though.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#199

Post by dijit »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #191
beefhash wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a split in terminology, actually. IRCds such as InspIRCd and UnrealIRCd speak of cloaks in the sense of user mode +x, commonly set on connection, which scrambles an incoming user's hostname/IP address to e.g. hidden-5npgt1.iinet.net.au or hidden-qjia2j.ncp0.j4h4.014d.2804.IP. Freenode, nota bene the largest IRC network right now, uses cloaks to instead refers to a special format of vHost[1]. It does n…

Back in the days I had to pay extra for a bnc/bouncer service (similar to a proxy), now most IRC networks offer vhost automatically, but I assume it's a bit less secured since the IRC networks themselves still know your real IP address.

It's not really possible for a server not to know the clients IP address though, so I think this is fair.

I do see what IP you're connecting from, but that information is limited to me only, and it's not like I care unless you're doing something very harmful to the service in which case I would ban you based on IP most likely.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#200

Post by rgerke »

jotm wrote: post #196
LinuxBender wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never run across a VPS or dedicated server provider that blocked inbound IRC. What providers prevented you from running an ircd?

This was a long time ago (7-10 years), but 1and1, Hetzner, OVH, HostGator, LiquidWeb did not allow IRC hosting. They were the cheapest, tbf. I only use Linode now, haven't looked into it.

Hi there! Disclaimer - Linode employee here.

I can't speak for the other services, but we have a very active IRC channel. I run my IRC instance off of a Linode I created just for that purpose.

Post reply on HN