Bash IRC Quote Database

I neither own nor operate bash.org. I wrote the scripts, collected the seed content, initially in quotes.txt, and operated at geekissues.org/quotes/ until its move to bash.org. AMA

My quote being #11 in the Top 100 is the closest I have ever been to fame.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?207373" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?207373</a>

I got close to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?5273" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?5273</a> recently.<p>My work at one point had an OS X specific piece. So I got a wreck of a Macbook Air 2011 around 2013 or 2014, can&#x27;t quite remember, the original owner tried to replace the LCD and failed spectacularly (I think replacing the screen now would require replacing the motherboard) and sold it screenless for cheap, perfect for my purposes. I added a Thunderbolt-Ethernet dongle to it, chucked it in the parts cupboard (it has slats so it airs well) and forgot about it when I changed primary clients in 2015 and I no longer needed it. A couple weeks ago I needed a Mac again and thought hey, I have a wreck. I checked LuCI and hey, there is wreck in the DHCP leases, that thing is still alive, I ran VNC against it, but what&#x27;s my password? I haven&#x27;t logged in for more than four years, let&#x27;s reset the password. So I go to the cabinet, pull it out and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;SQbISmB.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;SQbISmB.jpg</a> URGH

Ah Bash! My friends and I found this at its heyday in the early 2000s right when we were becoming computer literate ourselves. We we not IRC people, but had a communal skype chat going[1] and recognized the conventions.<p>The hunter2 password joke is so iconic that I still see it referenced regularly. I always think about the &quot;moral combat&quot; top quote where someone is kicked with the input sequence for a fatality as a great example of internet wit[2]. In general, I think many of the top quotes succinctly capture the realities of membership in internet communities (the double-edged nature of having moderators, the daily trials of our fellow users, the delight of linguistic playfulness).<p>There were other quote sites out there. qdb.us comes to mind, though it seems to have lost all its content, you can still see it on the wayback machine:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120131065558&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qdb.us&#x2F;top" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120131065558&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qdb.us&#x2F;top</a><p>[1] Skype, in its early days (and maybe still?), allowed group chats where other clients would send you the messages you missed automatically. We had no desire to run a server and this was in the era when Skype was nearly entirely peer-to-peer. I think of it as our own personal internet golden age.<p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bash.org&#x2F;?205195" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bash.org&#x2F;?205195</a>

(I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m logging into HN to post this, but hey)<p>I read many of these quotes back in middle and early high school, pretty early in the DB&#x27;s existence as I can remember when it moved to bash.org. I promptly forgot about its existence, but a bunch of the material remained wedged in my brain.<p>Fast forward 10+ years. I had recently started dating someone whose name is [redacted], and I was starting to meet a bunch of his friends and hang out with them more regularly. I made a reference to part of a quote, and one of his friends replied with the next line. Then said friend added, &quot;you know that&#x27;s [redacted] in that quote, right?&quot; I very much thought that he was trolling me, so I looked at the quote, and... well, it certainly says [redacted] in the username, but more importantly, it matched the pattern how he liked to format&#x2F;modify his usernames to indicate certain contexts.<p>And now we have been married for almost 6 years.<p>Internet???<p>¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Posted this for sentimental reasons, it hits all the right spots when reading these quotes.

This has already been around when I was a kid. Which was like fifteen years ago.<p>Oh, timelessness.

I&#x27;m somewhat surprised that no-one mentioned <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.im" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.im</a> (formerly bash.org.ru) yet. It started as a Russian equivalent of bash.org (the very first &quot;quote&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.im&#x2F;quote&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.im&#x2F;quote&#x2F;1</a> is infamously a translation of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?74629;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?74629;</a> and is still know as &quot;bash org&quot; even after the domain name change), but become a phenomenon of the Russian internet segment over the years.

The nethack equivalent: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nhqdb.alt.org&#x2F;?latest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nhqdb.alt.org&#x2F;?latest</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?330261" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?330261</a><p>&lt;i8b4uUnderground&gt; d-_-b &lt;BonyNoMore&gt; how u make that inverted b?

I feel like early IRC was when people were much more involved in communicating over the not so popular internet. Sitting and chatting was a way of spending time by itself. Brings back warm feelings.

my favorite so far<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?835030" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?835030</a>

ah, yes, trove of witty banter that i read obsessively in 1999 or so.<p>To this day, if you ask me &quot;hey do you know what sucks?&quot; my reflexive answer is gonna be &quot;vacuums!&quot;

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?362137" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?362137</a> karma?

Man this brings back memories. Oh how I miss the &#x27;90s

When the original iPhone came out, bandwidth on Edge was so slow that Bash was just about the only site I could load with a good ratio of load time to enjoyment. I read a lot of bash, then.

Always fun to see this pop up now and then. My old handle and young wisdom <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?7717" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?7717</a>

Impressed by the amount of hn crew claiming they have quotes on there. Maybe not all of it is fake after all

A couple of mine are still around: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?105643" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?105643</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?105259" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?105259</a><p>The MegaZeux community was awesome

Well, this may totally destroy my productivity today...<p>Also, just a note: you may want to make it more apparent that the &quot;Top 100-200&quot; is 2 different links. Took me a while to figure out why I ended up in two different places on my desktop and laptop.

A quote of mine, from an eternity ago, is still floating around on the top 100-200 section after over ~15 years. It&#x27;s amazing (and weird?) that a 10 year old&#x27;s funny IRC chatlog is going to be immortalized on this site foreermore.

Also, there was qdb.us:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20190802095853&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qdb.us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20190802095853&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qdb.us...</a>

Fork of the Rash QDB: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paxed&#x2F;rash-qdb-fork" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paxed&#x2F;rash-qdb-fork</a>

One of my first full web apps was a clone of Bash.org with AJAX for the upvote&#x2F;downvotes for a web forum I helped moderate. Must&#x27;ve been early 2000s?

heh mine is still there too <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?605501" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?605501</a>

This is by far my favorite: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?23396" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?23396</a>

I though it went down.. Hmm, it didn&#x27;t so I&#x27;ll start reading that again ^_^ Thanks!

I have a few comments listed on there, haven&#x27;t visited that site or used IRC in ages.

AMA request: the hunter2 guy

This used to be on my daily read list, def some quotes from me on there.

Anyone remember the bash.org equivalent for the xkcd IRC channel, where you were only allowed to send messages that had never been sent before? I can&#x27;t seem to find it anymore — there were some gems that riffed on popular bash.org quotes.<p>EDIT: Found it! <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xkcdb.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xkcdb.com</a>

ah sigh, I too have some quotes in bash.org qdb.

hunter2 is one of the best: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?244321" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;?244321</a>

The current link to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;</a> is broken. Only <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;</a> works right now.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200525212839&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200525212839&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bash.org&#x2F;</a>

the &#x27;bottom&#x27; quotes are still accessible at ?bottom if anyone misses all the racist ones

A quick win for readability is to align the first character of each chat message. Perhaps some colors would be useful too. I noticed I had to expend quite some mental power just to follow the chats linked here.