IRC

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A typical IRC conversation.

What IRC looks like if you are on insub.

Logging private IRC conversations and posting them in public are always a great source of drama.

What you look like while on IRC.

To IRC ED, go here

Internet Retard Chat (IRC) (AKA Multiplayer Notepad) has been around for at least a hundred years. It's the bastard offspring of UNIX talk and ntalk protocols. Unsurprisingly, the existence of channels (to make communication a bit easier) created potential for vast amounts of drama, which quickly transformed from being potential to actual drama, human beings being what they are. Channel and network drama happens at an exponential rate of growth, but since anything rarely goes past words in the IRC protocol, it's entirely harmless and pointless. Stupid drama. IRC also is used to transfer two very types of important communication

Eye Arse-y users are on a continuous quest to gain more status. There are always more channels and more servers on which to gain ops. Eye Arse-y is also a center for warez. Once you've got lots of ops, Eye Arse-y users can try and claim the "LeetLadder." You've never seen anything so useless as someone with lots of IRCops who tries to use that status IRL.

Most people use smileys to express their feelings on IRC. Meanings of smileys differ from channel to channel. For example, people on one channel might say "::D" when they see something funny, but on another they might say "=DDDd" to express the same feeling. Acronyms like LOL, ROFL or LMAO are also used to express feelings but, as with smileys, their emotional content differ greatly from channel to channel.

Much lulz on IRC can be had at the expense of nubs, who are often told to scroll up after pasting old memes.

1 Networks
2 Clients
- 2.1 Bots
3 See Also
4 External links

[edit] Networks

EFnet

Today there are several thousand running IRC networks in the world. They run various implementations of IRC servers, and are administered by various groups of Ops (who are designed by the "@" before their screen name and the Satan palpably leaking from their black, black hearts), but the protocol exposed to IRC users is very similar, and all IRC networks can be accessed by the same client software.

[edit] euIRC

european IRC Network, where all the Eurofags hang out since the Servers with US-People are "too stupid" for them. Nobody outside of Europe knows about euIRC though, making it a Concentration Camp.

[edit] EFnet

Eris Free Net, the original IRC server network. By far the largest, most influential, and most culturally prolific IRC network. Occasionally those unfamiliar with IRC ask "Whats EFnet got that _Insert random retarded small network here_ hasn't?"

The only proper answer to this is "everything". Except services. EFnet has none of those.

The pasttime of EFnet is OP wars: fighting over who is channel operator. These are won by whoever can perform denial of service attacks the best. They are started by: (1) boredom of visitor, (2) OPs who ban people from boredom.

The Penis Pump trolls often times keep the EFnet opers busy, because opers are summoned to their channel at least 100 times a day.

[edit] IRCnet

IRCnet is also the original IRC network (depending on whom you ask). Actually, the original network does not exist anymore, because it was split into EFnet and IRCnet somewhere in the mid-1990s after some deep disagreement and a lot of drama between European and American IRC operators. This event is called The Great Split by IRC historologists. In practice, most of the European, Australian and Japanese servers (as well as an American server named Eris) went to the IRCnet side and the rest of the world to the EFnet side.

IRCnet is now mostly populated by European nerds and old farts who have been using the network for the last 15 to 40 years and are definitely not going to switch away. There are also many Polish and Italian trolls and that's why Poland and Italy have been permanently banned from most of the IRCnet channels. And yes, since the IRCnet operators are bored purists who don't want to change anything, IRCnet has even less services-like functionality than EFnet.

[edit] Undernet

What IRC looks like if you are on Bantown.

An IRC network with only channel services and lots of people who idle and trade child porn. It only has around five servers these days, you'd think they could keep them from splitting.

[edit] Rizon

Rizon servers.

Home to #4chan, faggots like awyeah, and many fansubbing animu faggot groups; the most frequent phrase uttered across rizon is "^_^". In 2007, operator Jason Michael Downey received an IRL banhammer from the FBI, and is currently working his way through a one year sentence for using a botnet to DOS other networks and their operators. One was unlucky enough to lose $19,500 because of the attacks [1], the biggest loss to the IRC world since Rob Levin met the front end of a Ford Taurus.

[edit] Other notable networks

People sophisticatedly expressing their joy on IRC.

What IRC looks like if you are on Freenode.

DalNet, where everyone was before they made it to UnderNet, former object of hatred for EFNet users. Now an internet ghost town.
The private network idlenet, governed by the evil cj contains the popular and dramatic channel insub. Don't go there, you won't like it.
Nightstar is where #wiigii! lives. You probably shouldn't go there either, as the stench of unwashed fanboy is strong.
EmpireIRC is probably the only place on the interwebz where there is around 5 servers to cater to 10 poke-nerds. It is a waste of time to even go there due to a weird cult following of a senior member by the nickname of Rex. His obsession with cows will break down even the toughest of minds and if that doesn't kill you listening to his mindless minions talk about him when he is not there will.
LinkNet is the home of most of the warez movement, but that will not be apparent upon entering it. Everyone moved there after they realized EFNet was just making them accessable to 13-year-old boys
zirc is the network of choice for users of the Something Awful forums. It is rumored that the SALJers are there too but noone is sure where now that #salj is defunct. Recent drama has led most servers and users to switch to the new network SynIRC.
Slashnet was created by Slashdot, and has attendant amounts of suck. Dupe channels are frequent and many channels are just thinly disguised trolls.
ICQNet is the official IRC network for popular chat protocol ICQ, so you just know it's going be AOLicious. ICQAOLNet funnels 13 year old boys, 16 year old girls and 45 year-old paedophiles in from their webpage, with promises of hot cyber. At first glance this may appear to be a joke, but amongst the top channels is #teens, #40_Something and #Looking_For_Love.
Freenode is the crap network run by ~~Rob Levin~~ and is the IRC locale of choice for open source, Wikipedia, and Lunix fanboys, Consequently, the opportunities for drama are considerable.
GameSurge is an IRC network made up primarily of CS.S kiddies, brain-dead users and fanboys of all walks of life. The shit channel known as G4TV has 2 channels on because they are too cheap to have their own IRC network. They are G4's IRC room and G4's Star trek 2.0 room. Rumor has it there are girls on IRC but it has yet to be proven.
Abducted IRC, a network for evil foreigners.
Underworldweb, a network for elitist loser drug tards.
DeltaAnime, usually for online games like Ragnarok, L2 Online, etc.

For network statistics, rankings, and a list of smaller networks, see netsplit.de and Search IRC

[edit] Clients

mIRC is widely believed to be the most popular IRC client. ircII is the canonical UNIX IRC client, but its userbase has declined with the appearance of competing clients such as ircII-EPIC, BitchX, irssi, X-Chat etc. The irssi client is notable as the standard one for use in #insub, especially with hot gay.pl integration action.

A framework designed to incorporate IRC into other various other applications, such as games, is LibIRC, although it is still heavily under development.

Mac OS X can also run any Unix-like client in its command line or its window server, assuming you believe the myth that anybody actually uses Mac OS X.

[edit] Bots

Because IRC is a tedious bore, where the few and far between lulz drown in a sea of drama, people often leave. The acne encrusted founders, who believe that user counts contribute to their e-penis, pad out the channel with unintuitive automated clients called bots. A bot’s job is to ensure you have no lulz at all by wearing the remaining human user-base down with constant abuse. Bots employ the following tactics:

spamming the Urban Dictionary definition of queef every quarter-second
repeating the same damn 6 quiz questions in sequence for 6 hours straight (which the players still fail to answer correctly)
kicking anyone who types more than 2 lines in 10 seconds
getting into kick-loops with each other
foiling your mass-kick antics
spilling scalding coffee all over myself

There are many different types of bots, but they’re all owned and configured by retards, so whatever positive features they have will be disabled, or twisted into various extremes of stupid.

See: madcow