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Joined: May 2012
Posts: 1
JustinJ Offline OP
Mostly harmless
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Joined: May 2012
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Hi fellow mIRC users,
I am looking for active IRC servers.
I am looking for current 2012 servers.
What has happened to loyal IRC users?
Have they all been gobbled up by Facebook and Tagged?

I am a long-time user and remember the good old days.
Undernet, Dalnet and EfNet.
I remember when local people would have large meetups.
I remember almost 30 people joining live events in the 1990s.
Today, I am lucky if three people chat in #canada or #toronto.
I also join #france, #germany, #france and #espana.
I also join #newyork, #texas and #mensa.
Yes, I speak English, French and Spanish and even some German.
Please suggest current, active IRC servers for 2012.
For the last 6 months, I only see Philipino chatters.
They go to all countries and nobody else is there.
I live in Toronto, Canada and I looking to find active, North American Chatters. Or good European chatters in European channels.
#mexico has banned all Canadians on Undernet.
I like to travel and meet new people.
I have been to Mexico and South America many times.

1. Could you suggest good current, active servers?
2. Could you suggest good current, active channels for the above topics?

Thanks,


Last edited by JustinJ; 29/05/12 01:14 AM.

Justin Keswick
Toronto, Canada
JustinJ on Undernet
Joined: May 2012
Posts: 1
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Joined: May 2012
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There are still a good many users on from the 'old-days' as you say. There are also still several network(s) in which are gaining in user(s) instead of declining in users.

DALnet gets around 15,000 at peaks now, however, I do know that the channel #Toronto there is usually quite busy. The channel #Canada there is also pretty well populated.

As for Undernet, EFnet, etc - I'm not sure about them.

Networks such as Freenode are growing in numbers; they just hit a milestone for their network and reached over 70,000 connections.

Though a lot of people have went to facebook, some of us from the 1996 era are still around. I still prefer DALnet after all these years. The network in which I was a CSOp for 8 years was Webchat, I can tell you they however are on the decline, as well as other networks. You just have to search, you'll find a channel &/or network in which you like.


DALnet: #mIRC SOp / #HTML Founder / #Help
Freenode: ##WebDev / ##Psychology / ##Photoshop
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Babel fish
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Can only respond concerning EFnet, but the full list of servers can be found at www.efnet.org. I'm sure the other networks have similar lists.


mIRC 7.51, 64-bit Win-7/SP1 Home Premium
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Hoopy frood
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http://searchirc.com has listings according to user numbers, and similar stats for user counts, if you're interested in numbers.


- argv[0] on EFnet #mIRC
- "Life is a pointer to an integer without a cast"
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Hoopy frood
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IRC has been in decline for years though many will not have noticed it happening for as long. Those, including me, that prefer to haunt small community-based networks will have noticed it more. It's much easier to see a decline amongst a few thousand or few hundred users than one hundred thousand.

IRC's first enemy was the instant messenger and there were at least four popular ones that poached chat traffic from IRC and IRC was often used as a spam method for those wanting to populate their lists of contacts. Then along came the first social networking websites, joints like MSN Spaces and MySpace. After that came Facebook and Twitter. In a few years Facebook will die off because of their apparent flagrant abuse of user privacy and their datamining activities. Something else will come along and take over that.

Will IRC continue for the foreseeable future? I think so. There's no reason why it shouldn't although IRCd server development is not exactly continuing at a frantic rate either. Once we could expect huge server upgrades every three to six months. Now we'd be lucky to see a bugfix release once per annum unless one goes for an expensive package like ConferenceRoom. For the more traditional server software packages, it is looking like the end of the road for further advancement - there's only so much one can add to a system that is more or less just a text-based chat protocol and let's face it, with most IRC users that is all they want - raw text.

Kids as young as ten are being weened onto social network sites and they stay there with the same type of addiction that IRC users once had. There's little chance of them considering a move to IRC.

Finding an active IRC server could be as close as typing "Chatroom" or "IRC server" in your favourite search engine.

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Hoopy frood
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I think it's noticeable on larger networks too, when you join channels with like 150-200 users and there's nobody talking!

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Hoopy frood
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I made a post giving real statistics on this a few years ago, but I figure I'll update it here. In short, your observations are heavily misleading and lacking in context.

IRC is only in decline relative to the unprecedented and enormous influx of users that started using IRC between 2002-2004. Not that I can draw a correlation, but fun fact: Napster closed in 2000/2001-- that's about the time that users started connecting to IRC in droves. Again, not drawing any conclusions, but it is an interesting coincidence. IF that correlation does in fact represent the cause, then some of those extra users weren't really online for "IRC" anyway.

But in any case, IRC is still larger than it was in 2000, prior to the 2002-2004 boom. IRC isn't "in decline" so much as it is stabilizing "post-bubble". Here are the oldies:

See http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/

EFNet:



IRCNet:



Undernet:



In almost all of those graphs, the levels in 2012 are still higher than in 2000, though there is a slight perpetual decline. That slight decline, however, can be accounted for, even if some of those users are in fact leaving IRC-- because many new users are joining. See below.

First, there's QuakeNet, which is probably large enough to single handedly scoop up the majority of the user loss in the last few years. Although the graph shows it in a steady decline, it's important to realize that it is currently by far the largest IRC network:



Then there is Freenode, which has grown steadily and significantly over the last decade. It's growing at a rate that seems to exceed the decline rate of most of the major networks combined:



There are also networks like Rizon have also seen stability, if not growth, in the last few years:



And finally, companies like Ustream and justin.tv are starting to use IRC as their backend for all chatter, so IRC is still being adopted on large scales, just in less obvious ways. For reference, Ustream's network has looked pretty healthy (the variability is due to the temporal nature of live streams, so the wild usage spikes are a reality of the medium):



All I see from these graphs is stabilization, and maybe some migration of user types. The devs are coming back to IRC, and the casual/warez users are leaving. Gaming users are a little more interesting-- QuakeNet is in decline, but gaming-heavy sites like justin.tv and ustream are growing, so it might just be a migration, not an emigration.


- argv[0] on EFnet #mIRC
- "Life is a pointer to an integer without a cast"

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