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 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!
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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.
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.
To expand on this Have you considered Matrix? It’s like IRC but encrypted AND includes a bridge to IRC so you can have the best of both worlds. https://matrix.org/ The most popular client here https://element.io/ though there are many others.
@Tekchip @AndrewZen And the protocol is a million times more complicated and doesn’t always work reliably and requires a lot more server resources.
I have to agree. I love the idea of Matrix, but as someone who pushed his family to use it for the last two years, it is not reliable. Messages not going through, or going through but delayed, or having decryption errors. We moved away from it about two weeks ago due to important messages not making it through on many occasions and the confusion and frustration it’s caused.
I want to move over to it (in the medium-long term) but yes, there are a few deal breakers.
First, the clients are horribly resource hungry. If I open Element on my phone, it will keep synchonizing my messages for minutes until I can see any new messages, all the while CPU usage is through the roof.
Then, push notifications on my phone are not working even in the official client, Element.
But I’m aware of the pitfalls of how encryption work there, so I would just not bother using that feature for now. Like, if 2 if you start exchanging messages, and a 3rd family member joins, they will not see previous messages, even if you have set history visibility that way, and there is no solution whatsoever. This is because encryption keys that were used in the past are not sent to new participants.Currently we use Telegram, and there are disturbing changes lately, but that is at least performant, it works, and still much more trustable then facebook or google.
Speaking about notifications, did you check out your phone’s battery conserving settings? My friends having a Samsung or Xiaomi also have this issue due to aggressive restrictions on less-used apps. You can find more info and workarounds here: https://dontkillmyapp.com
Yes, but because of the resource usage of that app, I’m kind of reluctant to allow it to run more.
Also, I forgot to mention that I’m trying to use UnifiedPush (with ntfy) instead of google’s infrastructure. Sorry for that.
