This is sad because BotBot.me shut down not that long ago too.
We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment. https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/
Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#22I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to u…
What happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#23I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to u…
What happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
Keep an eye out! :)
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#24So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.
IRC has a ton of advantages:
1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school.
2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting.
3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison
4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language.
https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/
5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself.
e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language
6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time.
7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server.
8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#25I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the perl/raku communities, but also other channels).
Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly impossible to me, so I shut down some time ago. (It might have violated earlier privacy regulations as well, hard to tell).
Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it goes to court, none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own lawyer seemed too expensive, and nobody who asked me to continue running it offered to pay for a lawyer either. Tough luck.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#26So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical help and discussion for most projects.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#27I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to u…
If only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone out there is willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you coffee so I can switch over from irssi
mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#28So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
If gmail had a dad who was more famous and more successful in a world no one remembered anymore.
Think of the father in “there will be blood”.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#29So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice. IRC has a ton of advantages: 1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth.…
re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary, and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds are when you want to download it out of the service itself.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server. There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.
Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?
I think this would be useful: how many unique users have sent at least one message in the last 24 hours?
I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day.
There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-related webdev Discord servers that that each have at least 100 unique users interacting daily.
I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just echoes in the system, autoreconnecting from old hardware long after their owners have moved on.
In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing great!" But frankly I don't think people realize how much IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has been eaten and it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging people who once used it in its prime.