I ended up open sourcing it and it still lives on 19 year later, about three forks deep and a lot more stable and functional. The power of open source!
Some of the most fun I ever had was trying to make the utterly ridiculous mIRC script programming language do things it was not meant to do. Pretty sure I recall someone I know writing a primitive web server with it IIRC
The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the "captcha" (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad -- think "jh412ec@[12.34.56.78]" -- that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC.
The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs.
It then read the body of the email and "clicked" every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials... and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined.
Being k-lined wasn't an issue though. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute.
Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.
AWESOME memory you describe there.
OMG, fond memories of the day me and my IRC friends in high school somehow figured out that there was a bug in our network's ircd that allowed us to cause the server to segfault simply by setting a strange combination of a large number of modes on a channel.
The ops were pissed but they got less pissed after I submitted a patch, after I went looking in the C source code and figured out it was probably a buffer overrun.... Something like maxing out an undersized buffer by using every zero argument mode possible, duplicating modes and as many one argument modes with long nicknames... like MODE #channel +mmmvv LongNickGuy1asdfasf LongNickGuy2skldjfaklsjd
...and that was my first non toy experience with C!
IRC was a way cooler world than the current internet.
I had my own learning experience when I accidentally deleted all my plugins’ sources and couldn’t recover it. That was an important lesson on the reason for backups and version control. I burned a ton of time on those plugins.