The Problem with IRC

> So why are the basic problems not getting fixed?

Because it's a protocol, not a service. There is nobody in charge of IRC or its evolution, there is no single entity in charge of dealing with spam, so as he said it's every network's job to do it. There are of course some things that don't need scripting or a bot, such as history, for which we have a replacement protocol: XMPP. But short of having a single company running things, all the niceties of centralization can't be implemented .

IRC is just a really old protocol back from a time when security was an afterthought.

I like it. It is raw and functional.