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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#151

Post by lifthrasiir »

lrvick wrote: post #146
pen2l wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

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 (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…

Or equivalently you might be praising a protocol for some excellent channel choices (to be accurate, this would be a response to the grand-grandparent comment).

My personal experience suggests that IRC communities are just like other communities, that is, with a right amount of moderation and a right set of users they will survive, otherwise they will fail.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#152

Post by n0mad01 »

pen2l wrote: post #143
tapland wrote: post #99

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 lac…

> 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)…

wow, i have not made such experiences on IRC, worst things happened to me were questions go unnoticed.

but i also use it only for very specific technical topics.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#153

Post by detaro »

unimpressive wrote: post #135
protomyth wrote: post #9

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

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)

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.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#154

Post by crtasm »

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.

If your network runs services you can set your channel to require being authed with nickserv to join. Sure people can make a new account if you ban them but they can on a web forum too.

Or you can set channel so only voiced nicks can speak and de-voice a nick to moderate.

Or even make an access list so only specific authed nicks can join. None of this is ideal though I agree.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#155

Post by nexxer »

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.

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.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#156

Post by geokon »

unimpressive wrote: post #135
protomyth wrote: post #9

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

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)

I just use Thunderbird... It "just works" for email IRC and RSS - and it's very consistent btwn platforms. Maybe I'm missing out on some secret IRC features?

Re: IRC turns thirty

#157

Post by crtasm »

nullify88 wrote: post #134

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.

You can search Freenode's channel list at 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

Re: IRC turns thirty

#158

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

another-cuppa wrote: post #148
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!

Before I had a home network or always-on internet connection I used to play with servers locally. I actually set up my own IRC network using unrealircd and learnt how to configure it etc. I don't know why but one day I decided to try to telnet into the IRC server and it blew my mind that it actually worked. You can do the same thing with an FTP server as well.

SMTP too.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#159

Post by crtasm »

Doxin wrote: post #138
rhlala wrote: post #136

My issue with irc is everyone can see your ip adress right? Is there any chanel of hackernewsers with the same spirit as HN?

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.

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

Re: IRC turns thirty

#160

Post by 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.

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