Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”
Well let me tell you my friend. It stands for Internet Relay Chat and it’s been around for 34 years. It’s pretty much perfected at this point and quite easy to use if you have even the slightest technical knowledge.
So IRC servers are separate from one another with each server having it’s own admins. Each server you connect to has it’s own bots ran by individuals to messages and ask for things.
IRC servers work by sending slash commands much like discord does. To message another user you might type /msg coolboot2000 hello world! Piracy on IRC works by sending a bot a pm with the pack number you want.
“Where do I find servers and bots and pack numbers?” It’s as easy as using a xdcc search engine. http://sunxdcc.com/ has both a search and a list of networks. (DCC is Direct Client to Client meaning no files pass thru the server and XDCC is a version of DCC that allows large files to be transferred.)
“How do I connect?” You use an IRC client with SSL support. mIRC for windows and Hexchat with a patch for Linux. Once installed you can use the slash command /connect or use the clients GUI buttons to make a connection to the server.
“How do I make my own IRC client?” Follow the specifications here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_commands There are a ton of pre-made IRC libraries for pretty much every programming language.
Best luck friends!
Sure, but mostly by old school people because it doesn’t have the ability to embed emojis, images etc. in the chat so it’s pretty much just text. I mean you can paste links to images or paste Unicode emojis of course but it doesn’t come with an emoji selector or gif selector or anything like that. And no voice comm.
I still prefer it to Discord because with IRC you only connect to the channels you want on each server. Discord forces you to see all the channels on every server by default and it gets overwhelming quickly (I know you can hide and ignore channels but it still seems backwards).
You are wrong about everything but the voice comm because it comes down to the client you use.
Everything you mentioned is in irccloud, they even explicitly mention it on their homepage.
KiwiIRC seems to be an alternative to this.
That’s what I mean, it’s not an IRC feature, it depends on the client. If other people aren’t using the client with those features they won’t see the messages as intended.
Then you can’t make the same assumption about Discord, for example, because you don’t know what settings people use.
I know but there’s a difference between Discord having only one client that comes with a highly desired feature enabled out of the box, and IRC having multiple clients where only one supports features that the typical IRC user doesn’t consider important.
If a Discord user were to approach IRC with their normal Discord mindset they’re likely to use a client without those features, and wonder why IRC doesn’t have those features.
Matrix is what you want, it’s IRC with some extra features without Discord cancer
And no constant IP exposure!