IRC in 2025: Who Still Uses It and Why
Libera.Chat peaked at 50,000 users last Tuesday. OFTC hosts Debian's development channels. EFnet still exists. IRC is smaller than it was in 2003. It is not dead. Here's who's still here.
Read more →History, protocols, hacker culture and sysadmin stories. Written by someone who was there when the internet was still wild.
Libera.Chat peaked at 50,000 users last Tuesday. OFTC hosts Debian's development channels. EFnet still exists. IRC is smaller than it was in 2003. It is not dead. Here's who's still here.
Read more →The first time I put IRC behind a reverse proxy was in 2011 because our IRC server was getting hit by DDoS attacks and I needed to hide the real IP. The proxy absorbed the traffic, the IRC server...
Read more →Three open protocols for real-time communication. Each makes different tradeoffs. None of them is objectively best. Here's what actually matters when choosing between them.
Read more →I ran my first IRC server on a dedicated Pentium 4 box under my desk in 2003. It had one job and it did it fine — until the hard drive failed and I lost every configuration file, TLS cert, and...
Read more →I've been paying for IRC infrastructure out of pocket since 2001. First it was a shell account on someone else's server. Then a dedicated box at a French datacenter. Then multiple VPS across three...
Read more →I've compiled more IRC daemons than I can count. UnrealIRCd with its interactive configure script. InspIRCd with its Perl-based system. ircu with its hand-tuned Makefile. Charybdis with its autotools...
Read more →IPv6 adoption is accelerating, and IRC networks need to support it. Here's a practical guide to adding IPv6 to your IRC infrastructure without breaking anything.
Read more →Anope provides the essential services that make an IRC network functional — nickname registration, channel management, and user authentication. Here's how to set it up properly.
Read more →Discord is free. IRC is free too. The difference is what 'free' means. One costs nothing. The other has no owner.
Read more →My first IRC bot was a Tcl Eggdrop in 1999. It crashed every few hours and I had no idea why. When I rewrote it in Python around 2004, the crash-to-understanding ratio improved dramatically. Python's...
Read more →Prometheus and Grafana are the de facto standard for server monitoring. Here's how to set them up for real-world use — not just pretty dashboards, but monitoring that helps you during an outage at 3 AM.
Read more →I resisted web IRC clients for years. KiwiIRC was fine for guest access. Mibbit worked when nothing else did. But the idea of running IRC through a browser as my primary client felt wrong. Then a...
Read more →Running an IRC server for a handful of friends is easy. Scaling to 10,000+ concurrent users requires understanding OS limits, kernel parameters, and ircd-specific tuning.
Read more →In 2008, our network had a problem. Half the community wanted to stay on IRC. The other half had migrated to Jabber. Nobody wanted to monitor two chat windows. I wrote a crude relay bot in Perl that...
Read more →DCC was IRC's answer to file transfer and private chat — a direct TCP connection between clients that bypassed the server entirely. Here's how it works and why it's mostly broken in 2026.
Read more →In 2008, I was running a small hosting operation and we had an IRC channel — #ops on our private server — where the three of us coordinated everything. DNS changes, Apache restarts, customer...
Read more →Running your IRC server as a Tor hidden service provides strong anonymity for both the server operator and users. Here's how to set it up and what to watch out for.
Read more →For years, I managed IRC daemons the old way. Start them in a screen session. Write a cron job that checks if the process is running every five minutes and restarts it if not. Redirect stdout to a...
Read more →IRC has been a DDoS target since before the term DDoS existed. The networks that survived learned lessons that the rest of the internet would rediscover a decade later.
Read more →I've deployed both Atheme and Anope on networks ranging from 30 users to several thousand. My first encounter with IRC services was Anope 1.6 on an UnrealIRCd network back in 2003 — it crashed every...
Read more →In 2026, there's no excuse for unencrypted IRC connections. Here's everything you need to know about TLS on IRC — from client configuration to CertFP authentication.
Read more →The first time I dealt with a serious flood was in 1999 on a small Italian IRC network. Someone joined #roma and started pasting the entire text of Dante's Inferno, one line every 100 milliseconds....
Read more →InspIRCd's module system is its killer feature — almost everything is a loadable module, from channel modes to authentication backends. Here's how it works and how to extend it.
Read more →I've watched about 15 IRC networks die. Not from technical failures — from political ones. Servers stayed online. Code kept running. But the people running things tore each other apart over power,...
Read more →ZNC keeps you connected to IRC 24/7 so you never miss a message. Here's how to set it up properly, configure playback, and use modules that make IRC feel almost modern.
Read more →I spent most of the early 2000s telling people that real IRC users only use terminal clients. Then I ran a helpdesk channel on a mid-sized network and realized that half the users coming in with...
Read more →UnrealIRCd remains one of the most popular IRC server packages. Here's a practical guide to getting version 6.x running on a Linux server, with TLS, cloaking, and sane defaults.
Read more →Every IRC network needs a single hostname that points to multiple servers. DNS round-robin is the oldest trick in the book, and IRC has been using it since the early 1990s.
Read more →My first mIRC script was a quit message randomizer. It picked a random line from a text file and used it as my quit message. I was 15 and thought this was the height of programming. Twenty-five years...
Read more →Linus Torvalds didn't choose IRC. IRC was already there when Linux needed real-time coordination. That accident of timing created a thirty-year symbiosis.
Read more →After 25+ years of managing Linux servers, here's my hardening checklist — the things that actually matter, in the order you should do them, without the consultant-speak.
Read more →The first time I needed regex on IRC was 2002. A flood bot was hammering our network with randomized nicknames but a consistent hostmask pattern. The hostnames all ended with a sequence of digits...
Read more →I connected to Undernet for the first time in early 1998. I was running mIRC 5.31 on Windows 98, dialing into a local ISP in Turin. The server was london.uk.eu.undernet.org — I picked it because it...
Read more →Every year, someone writes an article declaring IRC dead. Every year, tens of thousands of people continue using it daily. Here's why IRC persists — and what it still does better than anything else.
Read more →Passwords are the worst form of authentication, except for all the others that IRC tried first. SASL and CertFP brought IRC security into the 21st century.
Read more →The IRC protocol is beautifully simple — human-readable text over TCP. Here's a practical guide to how it actually works, from raw socket connections to CTCP queries.
Read more →Back in 1998, I was running an Eggdrop on EFnet and noticed something odd in my raw traffic logs. There were these messages wrapped in \x01 characters — binary delimiters sitting inside what I...
Read more →Before GitHub, before Stack Overflow, before Discord servers — hackers met on IRC. The channels where security researchers, phone phreaks, and cypherpunks gathered shaped an entire culture.
Read more →I first installed mIRC in 1997 on a Pentium 133 running Windows 95. The download took eleven minutes over a 28.8k modem. That tiny executable — less than a megabyte — became the window through which...
Read more →Before BitTorrent, before Napster even, IRC was the file-sharing backbone of the internet underground. XDCC bots, fserves, and DCC transfers moved terabytes of data through chat channels.
Read more →I got my first O-line in 1999 on a small Italian network running ircu. The admin gave me a two-sentence briefing: "Here's your password. Don't break anything." I promptly /killed someone who was...
Read more →A Quake clan needed voice comms. They got IRC instead. By 2005, QuakeNet had more users than any other IRC network on the planet.
Read more →Before IRC, before the web, before most people knew the internet existed, I was dialing into a BBS in Turin with a 2400 baud modem. The board was called Punto Zero. It had 200 users, one phone line,...
Read more →In May 2021, the entire volunteer staff of Freenode — one of the largest IRC networks in the world — resigned en masse and launched a new network in under 48 hours. Here's what happened.
Read more →In 1992, a group of IRC users decided that EFnet's anything-goes approach wasn't working. They built the Undernet. The philosophical divide between the two networks still resonates in every chat platform designed since.
Read more →IRC bots were the original chatbots — automated programs that managed channels, served files, played games, and kept communities running. Here's how they evolved over three decades.
Read more →IRC's spanning tree topology is elegant, fragile, and responsible for every netsplit you've ever seen. Forty years of attempting alternatives haven't produced anything better.
Read more →The original IRC network didn't just grow — it fractured. Repeatedly. The story of IRC netsplits is a story of egos, politics, and fundamental disagreements about how a decentralized system should be governed.
Read more →In the summer of 1988, a Finnish student at the University of Oulu wrote a program that would change how millions of people communicate online. This is how IRC was born.
Read more →RFC 1459 defined IRC in 1993. RFC 2812 updated it in 2000. Seven years of protocol evolution, and most of it was about fixing the things the first RFC got wrong.
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