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!

    • Gond0r@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      I recently bought mIRC for this purpose after 30 years of borrowing it. Felt like I needed to being a relevant piece of software after all this time.

      • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Is it really still the best IRC client in the world? I stopped IRCing 15 years ago but nobody came close back then.

        • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I like KVIrc. Works on all major OSes. Was part of KDE once. Is really fast and incredibly feature rich.

        • Gond0r@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          Sounds like there are some good alternatives out there based on the other replies to your question.

          I guess I couldn’t go past the nostalgia.

          • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I’m iffy on those, though. They were both availableish in my day. Hexchat looks like a port of Xchat. The other was an old kde chat client. I’ve used both. Didn’t love either. But obviously that’s just me personally