Comment by prawnsalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prawnsalad | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of neat stuff in IRCv3 to bring IRC up to date, but most importantly it is standardising a lot of the existing protocol and patching up some of the existing warts that make pushing IRC difficult - all while being backwards compatible.

Developing kiwiirc.com over the past few years to cover many different IRC servers in all different languages and using many different services/auth services has been a real pain. It won't improve overnight but these IRCv3 extensions making their way into many different IRC server projects are really helping to smooth things out.

There is currently a re-write of the Kiwi IRC project to experiment and make use of the entire IRCv3 extension set, along with some other features to make web based IRC clients just as friendly and modern as people expect from messaging applications today. This will be a huge boost to the millions of people using IRC via Kiwi IRC.

IRC is getting interesting again and IRCv3 is up there making a lot of this possible.

I use KiwiIRC each and everyday. It's one of the nicest looking and easiest to setup web frontend for my hybrid-ircd setup. Sadly it's just a small group of friends and an OLD eggdrop bot that runs a crusty old megahal.mod as entertainment. I haven't found anything that runs as well and can create humerous replies since then. Hopefully the old code will continue to compile for awhile.

Anyway, I strayed off topic. I too am excited for IRCv3 and the future of IRC. I love the protocol, and despite it's drawbacks it serves my purpose well.

And thank you for all your work on KiwiIRC. I love the project :)

Bit off-topic, but Eggdrop was the very first thing I ever compiled from source WAY back in the later 1990's. I figured out how to hack together a (absolutely terrible) TCL script to monitor #fatefiles on EFNet for messages by certain nicks (a few XDCC bots) and echo them to another private channel. It was trash but it worked. One of my earliest experiences that I can remember with any sort of real code. Ahhhh, the good 'ol days.... great times. :-)

Me too! Eggdrop with TCL/TK on Undernet, with fbsql as mysql client. Rudimentary chatting with the bot and getting it to answer preset commands, looking up records in the database. It was frustrating, but when it worked it felt glorious.

> megahal

I have been running https://github.com/pteichman/cobe for a number of years and once in a lucky while it approaches the sentience of a drunk howler monkey.

I've been running this in a Telegram bot while simultaneously building a corpus library from the Simple English Wikipedia and the results have pretty pretty amusing thus far.

I rarely need IRC, so when I do I browse to http://kiwiirc.com. Thank you.

Thank you so much for developing such a great IRC client. Question:

>IRC is getting interesting again and IRCv3 is up there making a lot of this possible.

Could you elaborate? What are the most promising things about IRC today? I personally am a huge fan and have been a user for over a decade now. But I do see a lot of underutilized potential.

Do you think IRC will be able to compete with likes of Slack?

IRC is already more widely used than Slack. So yes. A better question would be of Matrix.im will compete with Slack -- and to that I'm not sure.

What evidence do you have that IRC is already used more widely than Slack? Also, what's your metric, number of users?

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