It's widely banned for its tendency to be a DDoS lightningrod, and only slightly less infamous for its impenetrable cliques of time-wasting losers. Was IRC just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or is the protocol responsible for its own failure? And how could we do better?
Discuss!
Quite simply, without IRC fansubbing wouldn't even BE, so halt the discussion already!
Uh-huh. Because nobody fansubbed before IRC, right?
Counterpoint: IRC warez culture is largely responsible for the sad decline of fansubbing culture into egowhoring and 0-day warez pimping.
I can tell you the scanlation community benefitted hugely from IRC. I don't know of any significant group that doesn't have an active IRC channel.
In fact, now that torrents are becoming the norm, quite a few of us are leaving the scene altogether. Chat channels that consist of bots alone are bloody boring.
Come to think of it, >>51,51 may be related. If all the casual chatters, who are there also to leech, no longer come due to torrents, what's left? Nothing but bots.
Nothing wrong with torrents thought. Convenience is a wonderful thing.
If torrents are becoming the norm, why do you have bots at all? Point being: If people viewed IRC as a distribution medium with chat on the side, they won't come when there's a more convenient distribution medium. But the problem isn't the torrents, is that IRC is seen as a distribution medium instead of as a place to talk in the first place. You should be advertising the IRC channel as a place to come and talk to the crew instead.
This won't work for a lot of translation groups unless they drop the idiotic superior attitude, though.
> You should be advertising the IRC channel as a place to come and talk to the crew instead.
Doesn't work. Most of the groups I've been in have tried, to no avail.
People need incentive to lure them in, and chat isn't enough to convince them to install an IRC client and learn how to use it.
> chat isn't enough to convince them to install an IRC client and learn how to use it.
That's ok; you didn't want those people in your channel anyway.
Touché.
>>56
It's a good thing you posted that with a tripcode. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known to expect such an insightful comment, and I might have passed it over!
I have to poo.
>>57
Wrong thread, wrong website.
>>60
your whore is your mum. gtfo.
>>55
But if the people are there and see someone talking, they might start chatting, too, or stick around even. The chance may be small, but its there. This chance is not given if they just go and download the torrents.
Also, what happend? Is net now dqn or something?
>>That's ok; you didn't want those people in your channel anyway.
I don't see where this attitude is coming from. It doesn't do much to dissuade people from believing that IRC-users are elitist.
That was hardly elitist. If the point here is to get people into the channel to chat, there's no use enticing people who wouldn't come for the chat -- because if they do come, they won't be there for the chat, they'll be there for whatever else you were offering; and they'll leave when they're done, and probably won't chat much, if at all, while they're there. Defeating the purpose of getting them in there to begin with.
>>64 But yet, in practice, most channels are either dead silent or are tighter than a twelve year old and therefore inpenetrable to your average new visitor.
I am an average new visitor, in fact I just recently started using IRC. I only use it to download scanlations, as most groups insist on IRC being their sole distribution method. Unfortunately my 30-day free mIRC trial is running out, so I was wondering if there is a way to get around paying the registration fee. Sorry for being so cluless btw.
You could not use it. mIRC isn't the only IRC client on Earth, you know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_IRC_clients
(It drives me nuts when people refer to IRC as a whole as mIRC. "I was talking to some friends on mIRC the other day…" KILL KILL KILL)
>>66 finding cracks for mirc is EXACTLY the kind of thing google was made for.
See you on mirc!
mIRC locks you out now? I thought it just kept nagging you.
All I remember about mIRC is khaled's squeaky nose.
>>67
I do that sometimes. And it sort of makes sense if they're actually using the Mirc client.
Like people say "I was taking on AIM"... but they probably wouldn't say that if they were using, say, Trillian.
People can also talk on the phone, but if they were talking on the phone through Skype, they would probably say they're talking on Skype.
I wouldn't. I have no idea how to pronounce "Skype".
>>72
I pronounce it so that it rhymes with "hype."
Appropriate.
If you have a group of ppl (geeks or not), IRC is still the fastest method to get them talking.
TeamSpeak and similar programs come next if you don't want to type.
Their strength lies in the ability to put up your channel (or even server) in no time and not having to go through stoopid registration process.
In many IRC web sites all the n00b must do is click on a button to load the IRC applet.
That said, most of the public channels on IRC are total crap. Apart from the fact that nowadays it's so difficult finding a chan with a conversation going, the most annoying thing is that in some fields (like, say, the Linux channels), it's almost impossibile for a normal homo sapiens to start a conversation or befriend the patrons without being bullied, ridicolized then ignored and eventually banned if he keeps trying to communicate. And this holds true equally for n00bs or skilled individuals.
I think the main difference with the corporation-backed networks is that while in those you find ppl who go there to actually CHAT (and if they don't want to chat they log off), in most IRC chans ppl simply "stay" to show off that they are there.
I agree that lots of damage in IRC has been done by the warez scene tradition which has been the cradle for some of the worst moronic attitudes seen in history imho, many of their holier-than-thou attitudes have been passed in some form to other tech communities.
It is also the fastest method to get them to start typing things like "ppl".
Maybe it's the fact you're getting older, so the people you used to talk to on irc are moving on and doing other things. Neither myself nor anyone I used to associate with on it use it anymore, because we're too busy doing whatever (finishing university, working etc). Things like LJ or forums cater to our 'needs' better, since we're rarely online at the same time.
I dunno what the youngins are doing nowadays. Myspace is too hideous to look at for more than a few seconds, so I'm not really interested in it.
Language is used to communicate. Making it harder for others to understand you is a hindrance to that end.
The presentation says something about the writer as well.
irc isn't dead, a lot of people still use it. I'll admit though, most of the people who use it are either
1) tech geeks
2) "underground" internet users
or combinations of the both
I find IRC a wonderful way to keep up with my online contacts, as the room I run usually has 10-15 people in it at a time and discussion is almost always going. Better than using a one-on-one IM client, at least to me.
Maybe we are asking the wrong questions. How about this:
It works for the kind of people who have the free time to while away hours idling on a channel between chats.
>>82
1)because some people want interaction from their social activities while irc users are content to just idle.
2)antisocial nerds on powertrips
/join #4chan on rizon and then tell me that IRC is dead
>>88
I was going to say, if that's what "live IRC" looks like, I want no part of it.
Remember when people complained about IRC instead of Discord?
sips monster
IRC failed because nobody remembers how to read anymore. Books are dead too.
I am going to see if IRC works over i2p now.
IRC let lives, IRC always lives.
Books ain't dead. ebooks may be digital but they still are books.
A major part of is it that the original IRC protocol doesn't do well in a world where most connections are ephemeral (smartphones, laptops). No one wants to run a persistent bouncer session just to view past messages. Other lesser things are that the original protocol doesn't handle rich media formats gracefully, so things such as images require nonstandard extensions.
There's also a concerted efforts by companies to favor their own walled-garden platforms over open interconnects (slack used to supprot irc but no longer, google used to support xmpp/gchat interconnect but no longer) so development on irc is practically frozen as no one's going to bother fleshing out and implementing the ircv3 standard.
The closest thing to a modern irc is the matrix protocol, but last time I tried it was really janky compared to irc. Plus development on that is spearheaded almost entirely by one company and I'm not sure there are even any alternate server implementations.
deltachat but for IRC when.