IRC is dead, long live IRC

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here.<p>The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.<p>Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, since, you know, these are tech startups...

I started an mIRC script site back in 1997. Young developers would email their scripts to me and I would write a very critical review of them. I did this for many months and the site quickly became one of the top IRC sites online. This momentum has carried the site all the way to 2013. While mIRC script traffic has steadily declined over the years there is still a strong community. We still have members posting mIRC snippets to this day. While I've been working hard to transition the site to more modern development platforms the mIRC posts keep coming. In fact I get a little embarrassed by all the mIRC content on the site. One thing I've noticed is that IRC is and always has been popular among very young developers. Many mIRC scripters are in their teens and some grow up to be professional developers. I've been watching them for 16 years and some come back and reminisce about their old IRC scripting days. IRC has been a major part of my life and has in many ways formed my entire development career.

I'm maybe an exception since I am and have "always" been heavily involved in IRC, but IRC is still a central part of my life. My irssi session is connected to around 120 channels on 16-or-so networks right now.<p>I've met my fianceé on IRC, got friends for life from all over the world through IRC, got jobs and assignments through IRC and I almost daily solve complex problems with the help of my community and network of friends and contacts through IRC! I've yet to find a tool that comes even remotely close to being as useful for me as IRC.<p>On QuakeNet we're regularly inviting companies to have developer chats, beta-key giveaways, and we have partnership with events like Dreamhack, for example.<p>On DALnet we've modernized our webchat (go to <a href="http://www.dal.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.dal.net</a> and give it a shot if you don't have an IRC client installed) using qwebirc (originally written for QuakeNet; but a lot of networks have chosen to use it) and also cooperated with mibbit.com and kiwiirc.com for allowing access.<p>At work I also run a smaller network with around 50 colleagues more or less actively chatting and using it on a daily basis. Digital office landscape working very well for people both at the office, at home or spread out over other cities.<p>A lot of applications, websites and services would benefit a lot by not having to reinvent the logic of messaging again by simply writing a frontend to an IRC server and have so so so much for free. Either on their own with an IRC server, or by setting it up towards one of our existing networks. If someone is interested to discuss such ideas, please just ask here or privately!<p>TL;DR: IRC still kicks ass! :)

I'm permanently logged in to over a dozen channels. They're all related to some open-source project or other.<p>In my experience, IRC today is a godsend if you want to talk to techie types, and largely pointless for anything else.<p>So it'd be no surprise to me if most of the people reading HN use IRC all the time, whilst the majority of the rest of the world considers it dead (if it's heard of it at all)

IRC was, at least for me, one of the main reasons that I pursued tech and started programming at a young age. A friend of mine introduced me to a local Irish group of Linux enthusiasts/sysadmins/engineers who put up with my foolish questions long enough for me to learn something. While some channels are very quiet now I still find it one of the best resources when I'm troubleshooting a problem.

There are a number of HN people who hang out on #startups on Freenode. It's quite informal, rude at times, and entirely off the record.<p>Interesting that IRC actually predates the web. I find it very useful at times.

This story reminds me of a funny story of how I came to learn Unix and found my future career.<p>In Fall 1993, I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and I was sitting in a computer lab, working on a CS assignment. There was an upperclassman guy sitting next to me, chatting on IRC. I'd never seen this before but I was intrigued. I was an avid BBSer and FidoNET sysop (LOL) and the idea of pan-Internet chat was fascinating. I asked him how I could use this program and he showed me how to launch the client on our school's VAX system. I was hooked and began to spend my weekday nights at the lab, chatting on IRC.<p>A month or so later, I got a call from my father and he was pissed. He had gotten a bill from the school for $800 of "computer time". As it turns out, the school gave every student a small amount of CPU time on the CTRVAX system to register for classes and send e-mail. I was a VMS rookie and I wasn't aware that I had to exit the IRC program when I was finished. I'd just been closing the telnet session and that left IRC running, eating up CPU time. It was like a cell phone data plan: you had your quota and everything over that was very expensive. After I got the call from my dad, I went to the people who ran the VAX and begged them for mercy on this bill. They were merciful but suggested that I find another system to IRC from. They suggested the Sun Microsystems desktops in the CS lab. The Suns were great because there was always a wait to get an open PC in this busy lab but the Suns were unpopular and always available. I'd never used SunOS before but some guy in the lab helped me get started with it.<p>These SPARCstations were very bare-bones. They had the Sun C compiler and of course OpenView but that's about it. I didn't know anything about compiling OSS back in 93 so I used a popular method to get a client installed. There was a server, sci.dixie.edu, that you would telnet to:<p>% telnet sci.dixie.edu 1 | sh<p>Yeah, I actually piped the output of a telnet session to sh(1). Unthinkable nowadays but this is how most of us got started. A few minutes of compiling later, I was up and running with a SunOS IRC client. Over time, I learned more about the Sun workstations and eventually because a Sun sysadmin.<p>I was a steady IRCer (terrapen on EFnet) until around 2003 or so, when the juvenile politics and fighting got to be too much.

Everything I know about computers and software is largely due to IRC. This is where I started to love hacking. So many great memories.. mIRC (A popular IRC client on windows) really got me started on programming. I learned "ifs", "for", "functions", "widget dialogs", "@window animations (and a base for game creation!)", "sockets".<p>I remember once I had built a IRC-server running in my mIRC, with all the robots (registering or protecting a channel) also from my mIRC. And then, on top of that, I had made a custom IRC-client with custom @windows.. We were averaging three users on my server, but oh my, that was cool at that time.<p>I even remember (I was very young at that time) that internet got shut down.. but I was still connected to my server. And I thought I had found a bug in Internet ;-) Obviously, I was just connected to localhost.. but the "What!!" moment was very funny.

IRC dead? I use it everyday.<p>IRC and Email is the only sane ways to communicate online at the moment. (In my opinion)

After googling, IRC is the first place I go to, to ask a question regarding some tool/framework/language/design. Long live Freenode.

It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time.<p>Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

IRC is still the best chat system. Anyone can get up and running in seconds, there are tons of Web GUIs and its fast as hell.<p>There are tons of alternatives, but none with the simple ubiquity of IRC.

I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us.<p>IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start &#38; restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.<p>Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).<p>Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.<p>Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.<p>[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.

Using it daily since 13 years back (half of my life) as the sole medium for communicating with most of my friends. First we had a channel on a public network but now we are on our own server since 4 years back. MSN had a stint as the way of communicating with my less tech savvy friends, it is now replaced by Skype. IRC feels kind of impossible to replace though.

"What IRC channels are you on" is a developer interview question here.

This is quite interesting. Citing the reasons of the decline of IRC makes it a more attractive prospect if you ask me now. Time to dig out irssi again :)<p>I was a user of IRC around 1998-2002 (I was a quakenet op) but I got lazy and bored of the politics and switched to MSN messenger which was vastly more popular as well.<p>The fundamental simplicity of IRC always rocked.

Imho it is not that dead at all, I'm surprised how often used it is. For open source support, but also by gamers for games.

I really attribute the existence of IRC to what I've been able to achieve in the past few years. Since starting my own network back in 2006 when I was in sixth grade, I've met numerous users who I've been in communication with for years, learned how to setup and manage a Unix server, how to deal with the occasional trolls and denial of service attacks. It even lead to me learning how to code, as I hung out with quite a few devs. In fact, my first online business was a result of some brainstorming on IRC.<p>Fortunately, for me, most of my friends that I met through IRC are my age (+/- a year or two), which I always found to be pretty neat. The conversation is always active for the most part, and most of the guys are in the US and UK, so it's usually active all day. Over the years, we merged/linked with other networks, welcomed new people, hosted channels for various open-source projects, but just as the article states, usage has definitely declined. I can recall back in 2009-2010 when we had servers in three continents to reduce potential lag when things were really going well. Now, the IRCd hub and services run comfortably on a Linode 512 without links.<p>Part of the reason I think we're still alive and well is because of the admins (NetAdmins, IRCops, etc). You'll notice that on most networks, admins are arrogant and very strict when it comes to messages per second, or banned words/topics. As long as nothing illegal was being discussed nor transmitted, we don't do anything. In all honestly, I can't recall the last time I used any commands to ban, Gline, Kline, and so on. This is what contributes to a network's longevity.<p>It's comforting that IRCd(s) are still being actively developed, but I would really love to see its popularity pick back up again. It's really an amazing tool for communication, whether it's used for collaborating with coworkers, discussing open source projects, or even for a casual chat.<p>If you find yourself looking to connect and need a client, you might want to download Textual (for OS X only, available through the Mac App Store or Github).

I am 18 now and have been irc daily for the last two years (mostly open-source dev) i knew about it for a long time but back then was a windows user so couldnt find a good client+ didnt understand the commands. Now i have completely shifted to Linux and cant imagine open source development without irc.

I am currently connected to 7 channels on Freenode!

I am surprised not to see mentions of SILC here. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)</a><p>Especially when running your own server this would be a more secure alternative.

here's a question - if I want to setup a company wide IRC server, which (super easy to install) server should I go for ?<p>Do note that I will be hosting this on EC2, so some semblance of authentication/security would be welcome.

I use IRC every day, its basically one of the most useful communication mediums for me. IRC will never die, but people will always try to change it and fail; Its best as a simple communications medium.

One of the weirdest hold outs of IRC I know about is the collegiate academic competition (or quizbowl) community. Serious quizbowlers across the country still hang out in #quizbowl on Freenode every day, shooting the shit, discussing a novel or philosophical treatise, discussing tournament shortcomings, or just playing a round of the game, shoehorned into the IRC ecosystem. There's a great moment when you think that you buzzed in first, but really a netsplit is about to occur, and the moderator never even noticed you trying!

As the article mentions outside of freenode and tech departments / company's who are tech oriented IRC is dead or atleast declining.<p>Back in the day you could find a server to talk about your favorite band or hobby or tv show. Meet like minded people and make friends.<p>Today Twitter or Google+ is probably the closest alternative but are lacking the essence of what IRC was.<p>At scussion.com we are working on building realtime chat to be integrated with these communities (interest based communities).<p>I would love to just have a hangout to chat about sci if or sport like IRC was back in the day.

I'm also a big fan of IRC; I've probably been on EFnet since ~1993 and met a lot of great people there.<p>The weird thing for me was seeing how extensively the military uses IRC (for tactical communications relay -- various headquarters use it to relay information about operations, and they run structured channels for different levels of the organization). Sadly, mainly with mIRC as a client.

I stopped using irc about 4 years ago, and came back to it a year ago. It's like an old, faithful, trusty friend. That said, it does seem like a lot of people have abandoned it for pastures new, but everything old and boring becomes new and exciting again at some stage so who knows, we might see an resurgence.

I stopped using IRC several years ago. There are so many features in a multi-person chat that's lagging behind.<p>Jabbr (<a href="http://www.jabbr.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.jabbr.net</a>) is a good replacement for IRC, with features such as offline history, and embedded content (for code snippets, etc.)

I really would like to find good browser based IRC client that remembers me.

I absolutely love the #Python channel. For that alone I will love IRC.

I used IRC for 7 years at my old job, even in an office.<p>At my new startup we're using www.hipchat.com which is a pretty good replacement (simpler, no IRC server to setup), and its cheap.

I hope IRC isn't dead, I'm hoping to productize my replacement for cia.vc ( <a href="http://elfga.com/notify" rel="nofollow">http://elfga.com/notify</a> ) for startups

I love IRC. I picked it back up after around 9 years of absence and couldn't be happier. If you're interested, you should join freenode #startups, #ventures, #sfhn.

IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood.<p>They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, <i>shudder</i>) appeared on the horizon.<p>So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.

I was really into IRC 10 years ago and even though have not really been using it lately, I was about to go back to it. Miss those 'slaps'

IRC is the main way I communicate with my friends. I am both an IRC and Freenode lover.

i spend years on Quakenet a decade ago when i was still a gamer. Good times :)