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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#91

Post by quietbritishjim »

sshine wrote: post #68
sbjs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#92

Post by [deleted] »

paulie_a wrote: post #54
_8j50 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the complete lack of security and blind trust of server operators? It's downright dangerous to use it,but then again people still use email.

The same can be said for slack too. Irc is far superior.

[deleted]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#94

Post by sebcat »

movedx wrote: post #40
donatj wrote: post #34

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!

I keep meaning to write a simple client to get some networking code practice. It's been sometime since I wrote some. > It's what an open protocol should be. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I agree, but I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents.

> I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents.

Protobufs and similar serialization protocols are great for complex data. It is worth pointing out that we've had ASN.1 for a while and it's pretty fast too, at least for limited subsets of OIDs/types, in certain encodings, though XER or JER would probably not compete with BER.

HTTP/2 is a complex protocol designed to fix problems with the way people build websites today. A lot of its features does not make sense/is not needed for simple message passing.

e.g., some HTTP/2 implementations will probably see HPACK DoS bugs/vulns because HPACK is stateful, whereas if HTTP/2 wouldn't have HPACK that problem would not have existed, but the reason why HTTP/2 has HPACK is because people bloat headers with tons of stuff.

IRC works and works well for its use case. Apart from newline-delimited strings - netstrings and TLV are other examples of formats that can build great, simple and introspectable/open formats.

I'd venture a guess and say that an RFC1459 PRIVMSG message parses faster than a protobuf message carrying the same information - due to parsing an RFC1459 PRIVMSG message is so simple. Of course, if you want arbitrarily sized messages, or messages with an arbitrary number of nested messages inside it you need more complexity.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#95

Post by modells »

paulie_a wrote: post #57
gt565k wrote: post #33

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…

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.

With great warez comes great responsibility.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#96

Post by modells »

dmitriid wrote: post #71
yeukhon wrote: post #23

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.

You’re conflating technology and community.

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.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#97

Post by keithnz »

jiggunjer wrote: post #83
keithnz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure.... I still use it. But now IRC is much much more fringe, somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc is very fringe these days. It used to be like THE social networking tool. Somewhat like facebook. Maybe one day facebook too will be used by developers to communicate while everyone else is in virtual worlds

In my opinion the reasons for loss of userbase & mindshare: 1 Spam and noise -> No proper authentication and moderating system for channels. It's hard to keep bad agents out of channels. 2 Competition -> Forums had more features (including a solution for point 1, also https) and didn't require a special client. If you could easily send cat gifs in chats IRC would have been great.

there was comic chat :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Re: IRC turns thirty

#98

Post by Evidlo »

VectorLock wrote: post #6

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...

Qualcomm has such an IRC server. I interned there and used IRC to chat with the other interns even though most of the full-time employees used Skype for business.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#99

Post by 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.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#100

Post by p4bl0 »

sbjs wrote: post #62
donatj wrote: post #34

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!

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.

Some people already did a good job at making libs and tools to easily interact with IRC: libircclient [1] and the irctk [2] wrapper around it comes to mind. Using irctk it's remarkably easy to write an IRC bot that does whatever you want.

[1] http://www.ulduzsoft.com/libircclient/

[2] https://a3nm.net/blog/irctk.html

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