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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Why not just use IRC?

I'm a big fan of IRC, but there are two main reasons this argument doesn't work:

* IRC doesn't easily meet their extensibility requirements. Adding a new field to an existing IRC message just isn't doable.

* IRC has no concept of contacts. Their are bots on some servers and some clients will whois a set list of nicks on join to emulate this feature, but having contacts as a real concept is obviously preferable for Riot's use case.

* XMPP is also a standard protocol. If ejabberd didn't meet their needs, it's hard to see any standard ircd meeting them either.

ejabberd met their needs, they just gradually rewrote 90% of it. :)

I seriously don't understand how IRC has withstood the test of time and gets relegated to the back room. 3d.tv (Twitch before there was twitch) Used IRC in a way I could just go to the IRC channel and connect to it and the people could write IRC programs. Twitch.tv IRC is a little more hidden.

http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitc...

It only really confuses me because there's not really a lot of value in writing your own "not quite IRC" type chat system. Just think about the development and administration time that went into setting something up that's probably not as good as something you can apt-get install.

I can't agree more.

Are there any great examples of IRC being used for the backend of a games chat system?

How would you envision using IRC in this case?

Would have been great to see RiotGames write their own custom framework to interface between their game and an IRC backend, open source it for other companies to contribute to and prevent further reinventing of the wheel.

Worms Armageddon and some other Worms games use IRC for lobby chat.

http://worms2d.info/WormNET_(Worms_Armageddon)

Pretty sure Eve did/does. Twitch does.

I haven't really used Twitch broadcasting since it was just justin.tv, but back in those days it was very much just IRC. You could just connect to the IRC channel, and in fact if you wanted to capture logs of the chat or do bots that's the way you had to do it. I have no idea what it's like now.

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