Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”
Well let me tell you my friend. It stands for Internet Relay Chat and it’s been around for 34 years. It’s pretty much perfected at this point and quite easy to use if you have even the slightest technical knowledge.
So IRC servers are separate from one another with each server having it’s own admins. Each server you connect to has it’s own bots ran by individuals to messages and ask for things.
IRC servers work by sending slash commands much like discord does. To message another user you might type /msg coolboot2000 hello world! Piracy on IRC works by sending a bot a pm with the pack number you want.
“Where do I find servers and bots and pack numbers?” It’s as easy as using a xdcc search engine. http://sunxdcc.com/ has both a search and a list of networks. (DCC is Direct Client to Client meaning no files pass thru the server and XDCC is a version of DCC that allows large files to be transferred.)
“How do I connect?” You use an IRC client with SSL support. ~mIRC~ AdiIRC for windows and Hexchat with a patch for Linux. Once installed you can use the slash command /connect or use the clients GUI buttons to make a connection to the server.
“How do I make my own IRC client?” Follow the specifications here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_commands There are a ton of pre-made IRC libraries for pretty much every programming language.
Best luck friends!
edit: updated 11-6-23
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I haven’t used IRC since the 90’s but it blew my mind the other day when I found out mIRC is still going.
Oh wow. I completely forgot about mIRC.
Looking in my emails I still have my registration email for it. Dated 17th May 2003. Over twenty years ago! The links in it all still work too!
Thank you for registering your copy of mIRC, much appreciated. Your registration name and number are shown below. To enter your registration you must run mIRC, open the Help menu in the menubar, and then select the Register menu item. You can also register by pressing the keys Alt+H+R while in mIRC. Removed Removed xxxxxx-xxxxxxx Please remember to print out this email and to save it in a safe place for future reference. Getting started: If you are new to mIRC, you can find a beginner's guide to getting started at http://www.mirc.com/install.html Useful FAQs: The IRC and mIRC FAQS, which can be found on the mIRC website, answer most if not all of the frequently asked questions relating to IRC and mIRC. Recommended reading! You can also find answers to specific questions in my personal FAQ at http://www.mirc.com/khaled/faq.html Mailing list: If you'd like to be notified when a new version of mIRC is released, you can add your email address to the mIRC mailing list at http://www.mirc.com/mailing.html Helpful links: The 'More Info' section on the mIRC website has links to many interesting IRC-related websites, including links to books on IRC, technical information, and more. Hint of the day: Each window in mIRC has a system menu with useful features. You can view it by clicking the top left corner button in any window. See the 'System Menu' section in the mIRC help file for more information. Thanks again, Khaled
I love IRC. Love its simplicity and instantaneous nature messages. Nothing feels as realtime chat like IRC does. It’s also dead simple to implement and self-host. Only downside is iffy file transfers which don’t work unless you have public IP. Inline images would be useful. Perhaps time is ripe for IRC+ protocol. Add few extensions and you are good.
IRC+ is called matrix, and it’s great. Has images and offline messages
Matrix is anything but great. Tried using it for months, forced my employees to use it for business communication. Worst decision I’ve made of late. Messages would get delayed or never arrive. Frequent issues with clients. Server drops. Etc. Gave up on it long time ago.
Ahh yes matrix, IRC with the extra bullshit layer.
IRC+
That’s called a MUD server. :P
A MUD is basically text based gaming. Nothing to do with the topic here
person I replied to got the joke.
MUD is more like IRC-
MUD is basically a talker with a game.
There’s nothing like IRC+… Maybe, but just maybe, XMPP?
Sorry, i didn’t get the joke.
No problem friend. Basically the joke was that instead of using matrix to send picture to each other you can use the ASCII art or simple image loaders in a mud client to share media.
http://www.medievia.com/connecting.html - the medievia client for instance has image and sound support.
“Where do I find servers and bots and pack numbers?” It’s as easy as using a xdcc search engine. http://sunxdcc.com/ has both a search and a list of networks. (DCC is Direct Client to Client meaning no files pass thru the server and XDCC is a version of DCC that allows large files to be transferred.)
Thanks for this. Was on IRC since before Napster, Kazaa, etc. Torrent was the one that took me off IRC. Nowadays I just don’t know which server and channel to join.
https://www.xdcc.eu/ is also a big search engine
If I still need to run a bouncer to get history scrollback, then no, I will not consider IRC.
Just never close your client. :P
I think this post should come with a huge disclaimer that IRC is highly addictive and a major time suck. If you’re trying to remain productive, avoid IRC.
SOURCE: I was on IRC all the way back to the 90s.
Bringing me back to 1996 😆
Got laid on IRC in 1993. Can recommend.
ASL?
2000 version:
16, M, actual location
2023 version:
Millennial, they/them, parents’ basement
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
really 😳
Yeah, I’m cis male and met an amazing woman… I don’t think it was a common experience.
Aye. I even went to a couple of meets (PS Screw you, Lorry).
So did I. Pub near the Cenotaph in London by any chance?
Im still on a couple ircds
I still am on IRC and can confirm.
This is awesome. I’ve started using Openbooks for epub downloads from IRC. Need to look into other stuff too
Since RARBG shut down, I been using IRC more often for 2160p releases that are tougher to come by. Also, I never stopped using it for chatting. You won’t ever catch me using that bloated Discord garbage.
Could you tell a resourse for 2160p releases? Did not know IRC could be used also for such “big files”.
Seems like the recommended https://sunxdcc.com/ has some 2160p releases, though not anything that usenet or private trackers wouldn’t already have better versions of (from what I can tell).
Based. Haven’t ever used IRC tho. Zoom zoom here
I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.
I used to admin a warez chan back on Dalnet way back when. That was a fun time and I spent many hours in there making friends and causing trouble.
These days, I’m mainly looking for interesting stories or subjects I’m interested about. I don’t necessarily need interaction at every turn and more often than not, I’ll lurk.
I only have a ZNC bouncer and a copy of the lounge running on a VPS nowadays. Mainly kept around for some ebooks, and IRC only stuff like trackers. If I tried to actually pirate, I’d blow through the VPS’s monthly bandwidth cap.
Same here. We probably ran around the same channels. I was an OP in a few of those types of channels. Dalnet and efnet.
I probably tried to join your server, did something stupid and got instabanned.
lol, must have been one of many on my shitlist.
Sometimes I participated in IRC rooms through Matrix, but sadly Libera Chat recently ordered the partial shutdown of bridges to their network, so most of them won’t be available until they agree again.
The shutdown is still in progress, but I think from today you can’t open bridges to new channels, and then they have a timeline to further limit how they work.
You can, but the integration is not so transparent as before. For now, rooms <-> channels will be plumbed.
Yes, and to plumb any new channels you will need to contact a moderator of that channel
Thanks for the write. I’ve been playing with that search engine for a bit and most I can find is recent tv shows and movies. And some random stuff (mostly in german).
Could be usefull for some of us.
in the other guide i wrote i mentioned that its hard to find stuff older than 3 years. usenet/torrents is still probably better for older stuff.
Ah, okay. I guess I missed that or read over it.
I thank you for writing the guide because it’s always nice to try different methods of consuming content.
My fun fact is that I was born around the same time IRC was implemented. Last week of August, 1988.
Fun Fact. I’m fucking old. Every time someone says something like this, it’s like “aw shit. I was on IRC when this person was in diapers”
That’s pretty cool to me. May I ask what it was like being into tech at that time? Were there many community efforts for communication at the time, that you can recall? I’m interested in hearing about yesteryear.
Oh god you’re making me feel old. I can’t see the “at that time” context because lemmy.ml is screwing up backlinks for me right now, but I’m assuming it’s either when I got into the net (early 90’s) or when I was all-in on IRC (late 90’s). This wil be a bit of a cluster of answers to both :)
Back when I got into IRC, there was quite a bit. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what I started using when. Back in the early 90’s, those of us online ended up on IRC or places like Delphi Forums. I lived on Delphi and it reminded me back then of Lemmy now. Arguably, the biggest problem with back then is that either a group had some technical following, or you just didn’t see much about it. Interested in some fringe philosophy? If you just looked at numbers I swear you’d think Discordianism or the Church of Subgenious were the world’ majority religion back then.
Otherwise, there were lots of Bulletin Boards forums. Google may be advanced, but it also spiders orders of magnitude more pages than existed back then. Yahoo was surprisingly good for the smaller web. Otherwise, honestly, things felt very similar to me.
Everything was simple, though. Had to be. 56k modems were real, really did make that crazy noise, and downloading a movie was genuinely an investment of time and effort. Everyone knew somebody who would sell them something like “Everything Metallica” on CD for $5, usually to pay for pot money or whatever. Why? Because even if you had access to everything metallica online, it would take you days to download it and clean that shit up.
Ironically, I think messengers were more used/useful back then. Perhaps because there were fewer, so you could talk to all your messenger-using friends by just running 2 or 3 on your computer? I STILL remember my old IQC number, and was always proud it was only 6 digits! I never got into AOL, but I had AIM for one or two friends, Y! for one or two friends, and IQC for 20-30 friends. Most of them were people I never met or would meet (super nerd). But it was great because you’d get to KNOW the people you got to know. I had a buddy in Norway who had so little in common with me, but we hit it off so good he ended up getting me into Melodic Death Metal and one of my still-favorite bands Theatre of Tragedy. Early side of that window, about 20% of IRC rooms were something between piracy, sex chats, or RPGs. The rest was a random mishmash. Later on, I swear there were more RPG chats.
I could probably talk for weeks on it. There’s a few products that came and went that I swear should have been the “next big thing” but failed due to bad business. There was a community game engine I worked on a game for called BYOND that still runs with a couple thousand players. It would’ve ended up on a front page if the founders either had more business savvy or just open-sourced it. Then there’s Digg. Talk about a mirror image of the reddit bullshit, but Digg was smaller AND fucked up bigger than redit did. None of us were happy to go to reddit, but digg turned to shit. We knew reddit was crap (nobody ever thought their leadership was ok) when we went there, but there were no other options anyone took seriously.
That about gets us to the end of “the good old days”.
This is pretty much exactly what I was doing in the early 2000s, when we got our first family computer. Thank you for the nostalgia.
There was a community game engine I worked on a game for called BYOND that still runs with a couple thousand players.
nice. Played a bit of Space Station 13 so thanks for that. :)
You probably never heard of game I worked on (House of Morte). It only spiked to 50 players at its peak. I’ve heard so much about Space Station 13, but ironically never tried it. I actually got sick of BYOND really fast but had ironically fallen for that one game before that happened.
That’s really cool thou. my biggest claim to fame is a mod for dfhack for dwarf fortress that showed a little quick status menu.
Really hating lemmy.ml here because direct-links are broken. I can’t see what you replied to, but I’m guessing it’s the dinky little BYOND game I took part in making.
I’m guessing more people used your dfhack mod than played the game I worked on :)
Shit, the week after for me.
Wow, IRC takes me back. Thanks for posting this.
I have not used IRC extensively. But i have used nibl.co.uk (for anime) a couple of times when I couldn’t find torrents.
IRC really needs a discord styled client.
Something where if you drop an image or video onto it, it’ll automatically upload it to a private imgur link and share it.
If you want to share a larger file, maybe it uploads to wetransfer or something automatically.
Discord is basically IRC and more, but it’s also easier for non-techies to join a discord server, and you have a common identity across all servers.
The beauty of something open like IRC though is the fact that you can make and use any client you want, including an old C64 if you really wanted to… with additional adapters of course
thelounge exists
I could never get into web based clients. Always seemed backwards to me to have a web browser as a dependency.
I definitely understand that.
I personally gave in because it made file uploading easy as well as the fact that thelounge also acts as a bouncer, keeping me online 24/7 even when my browser isn’t up.
Also, it’s not discord. :o
I was running a matrix -> irc bridge for a while and it would automatically upload and make small files available.
Something where if you drop an image or video onto it, it’ll automatically upload it to a private imgur link and share it.
If there’s not a script out there that does something like this i’d be surprised. If not IRC daemons and clients are mostly open source.
I never found ways to pirate with discord. i’m sure there are but IRC is just so easy.
IRC does have file transfer, was how all us cool kids back in the early to mid 90s shared stuff. Its just that sharing is either p2p or you need a bot to mimic p2e.
As for the images, part of the benefit of IRC is its so ridiculously simple that you barely need anything to do it. Yeah features can be added to apps but the payoff isn’t great. If you have the imgr app installed you already have quick image hosting. Tying apps to other services seems counter to how generic and open IRC is.
mimic p2e.
What does p2e mean in this context? Tried looking it up but not finding anything that sounds right. I’d infer it may mean something similar to client-server, but I’m blanking on what the ‘e’ would stand for then.
Person to Everyone. In the context of this discussion i can post an image, video or file to a discord channel and everyone who goes in there can download it.
In IRC you make a client to client connection and send files directly to one another. You can setup a bot to respond to individual requests and transfer files but there is no “hey everyone download this”
Aaaah, thanks for clarifying! I’ve only dipped in & out of some IRC channels and used it very casually, so wasn’t familiar with the terminology.
The specific protocol for irc is called DCC (Direct Client to Client). It enables a lot of non-chat functionality, one of which is sending/receiving files.
Yup, use to download all my anime through IRC when I was young 90s and baka torrents or similar. Good times.
I started using it on a daily bases since I switched to Linux. The distro I use as daily driver and other large projects have their support team on IRC.
It is much much better than posting on forums. You get instant response.
It is much much better than posting on forums. You get instant response.
Agreed. Even for channels that aren’t tech-related, if I have a quick question, I typically get a faster, more in-depth response than forums/Reddit/whatever. They may not always be the correct answer, but they usually point me in the right direction. Anyone still hanging around on IRC tends to have good troubleshooting instincts.
