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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

The problem with most IRC software is that they're not always online. The usual solution is irssi, which is what I've used for the last 6 years.

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If you mean not always connected to IRC and that your solution is to run Irssi in a screen/tmux session on a server somewhere, it's considerably easier to use ZNC.

http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC

I don't remember trying ZNC, but the problem with all the irc bouncers I've used before was that it wasn't neatly integrated to the irc client. If you're using screen+irssi, everything works exactly like you would expect. With irc bouncers you have various issues, e.g. when you connect all the channels need to send 2000+ rows of backlog for every channel, which is pretty inefficient.

What!? That's completely the opposite to my experience! Essentially, after setting up ZNC to your liking, all you have to do in your client is change the irc server from say, irc.freenode.net to znc.yourserver.com:port and add a password for the server, username/freenode:password, done!

I thought it'd be annoying having to add servers through the ZNC interface (either web or SSH) but it automatically adds/removes them when you join/leave.

In terms of buffers, I generally don't have it set to 2000+, normally around 100 max. I'll just go through the logs if I really need to catch up.

The clients I use have ZNC integration. I use Textual on OS X and Colloquy on iOS. Both automatically play back the buffer when they connect without having to do any setup like perform scripts or whatever.

I also compiled a module for ZNC that sends push notifications to Colloquy when a PM, highlight word or name mention happens.

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