The internets is changing and I believe IRC is going to fade to nothing. I think it would be in khaleds best interest to invest some money into the development and modernization of irc servers. or at least make a move to work with developers in coming up with modern ideas faster

bring mirc forward. by forward i mean, link into the various social networking applications that seem to be the big thing nowadays. does IRC have a place there? instead of just a program that sits lonely by itself, that not many people find.

where is ircs place in this modern intarnets? where can it go, any ideas.

things arent happening i feel like irc is decaying rapidly

That's the top 9 networks at the moment. 199,108 channels and 436,616 users online on just those 9 networks @ 4:30PM CST when MOST people are still at work or on their commute to home.

Sure looks like IRC is dead or dying to me.

Did you know there's a whole world out there that doesn't share your timezone?

Duh! REALLY??

And what percentage of the IRC users are outside say, the US?
And how many of the people in the US are either at work or commuting?

My point was, there are nearly half a million people on 9 networks that are currently online .. sure looks like IRC is dying to me.

But then there are people that would nit-pick just for the sake of an argument. read my signature

My best guess would be far more than half of them. On QuakeNet for example, about 95%.


How many people in Europe just went to bed?


I'm sure that at some point in time, half a million people were using horse carriages. If you want to focus on whether something is dying, a single number tells you nothing. Trends do. For example, irc.netsplit.de has such trends and these show that the number of IRC users has slowly but surely been declining over the past few years. Yes, in absolute numbers there are still a lot of IRC users, but I'm sure the part of the OP's idea was that if something is to be done to stop that decline, it should be done sooner rather than later.

here are some pretty pictures that sum this up, being self explainitory. these are the top 6 on irc.netsplit.de

lol, interesting. Dalnet never came back after it was taken down due to DoS, it looks like. stayed steady, but never returned to what it was.

IRC infiltrated the gaming world, so it no surprise to see quakenet healthy although it is decaying. If these were stocks id sell immediatly.

Anyways thats kind of what i mean, IRC found a place in gaming, and it needs to be taken to other sectors of the intarnets. I guess im just wondering where people think it will go from here.

That's pretty vague... do you have some concrete ideas to discuss? (For my part, I don't!)
Regarding the statistics - they're nothing but statistics; diversification of the networkscape is an inherent (?), central feature of the the history of IRC. Shrinking heavy nets do not denote less users in itself. And btw a lot of networks - especially medium sized nets (say, 3k to 10k users) - dislike indexing drones and simply don't appear in these stats.
Apart from that and my own doubts about the need for change, I'd like to read about viable, inventive ideas; flailing ones arms "one has to do something" won't further anything.

The trends just look to me like the IRC networks are flatlining back to their pre-2002 numbers... these graphs don't show death at all. One way to interpret those numbers is that IRC exceeded its "capacity" (not physically or technologically, just socially) between 2002-2006 and is now returning to a more stable level. There are many examples of this happening in all forms-- the dot com bubble is the first that comes to mind.

More importantly, it shouldn't matter if IRC dies. Nobody should fight for the survival a *protocol*. If IRC were to die, it would be because it was obsoleted by another technology that serves the same purpose. This is normal and happens all the time. IRC obsoleted the (pre-web) BBS, and in time, something will obsolete IRC. The death of IRC will definitely not mean there will somehow be less people communicating via text on the internet. Besides, if IRC changed to the point where it was substantially different, you'd have just ended up killing it yourself.

Death or no death, I don't think Khaled needs to worry about this. mIRC was popular, profitable and useful in the 90's when (looking at the stats) there were orders of magnitude less users on IRC than there are now. Judging by the actual trends it would take another 10 years before those graphs hit those 1990 levels again, so mIRC should remain useful for a while longer. And even if it did eventually become useless in 10 years, I'm sure he'd be glad to start working on something new by then.

Also, irc may not be 'popular' but it will still be used. there are people still using telnet for irc when there are completely capable clients designed to make irc easier to use. there will always be a group that will use a 'thing' long after everyone else has moved on.

With things like facebook where you can chat in realtime on the website itself and many other social networking websites being built with similar features, of course IRC is going to decline. Whereas all of these social networking websites are being constantly updated with fresh ideas, IRC is basically what it was 10 years ago.

In order for an irc client to be "fresh" the entire protocol would need to be remodelled and redesigned.

agreed

could be just a bursting bubble.


Believe me, I believe in darwinism and if mirc has no place on the internet, then, it just doesnt. Its just a shame though, because theres so much surrounding IRC and these various clients like mIRC. More than just text chatting back and forth. I became a programmer because of mIRC. mIRC introduced me to programming languages, and I learned a lot from the people Ive spoken to on IRC. So its just a shame to see all this die in favor of simple chat widgets and junk like facebook.

Anyway what had me thinking was, I loaded up mIRC for the first time in about 3 years, and I got two nag screens that seem to practically beg for money. and "act now! 50%" off". It would seem like things are heading downhill.

curious... 50% the mirc price? so that means $10 for mirc?

mIRC hasn't been going downhill just because there are ads in it now for those who haven't purchased.

Since you're getting those ads I imagine you never paid for a license. Khaled decided that instead of people leeching the program without paying for it, he would put in ads to offset the cost of people who should, but don't register (aka people like you). Seems like a perfectly fair thing to do to me-- the ads only appear after the 30 day free-to-try shareware license has expired. Khaled could have made mIRC unusable past the 30 days, but he chose to allow people to continue to use it with a nag screen. You should be happy you're seeing ads and not an unusable app.

The main reason for the discount is that I've been receiving an increasing number of emails from users asking whether they can register for less since they can't afford the normal amount. It's taken me a while to get around to it (apologies to those who have emailed me about a discount in the past!) but I eventually created the pages/scripts/etc. a few weeks ago to be able to handle discounts specifically for these users.

As for IRC's future - every few years, someone comes onto the mIRC forums and posts a message declaring that IRC is on the verge of extinction - this has been happening as far back as I can remember. While it's exceedingly likely that if someone returns to the forums and proclaims the same message once every few years they will eventually be right - I don't think we're quite there yet ;-)

I'm not sure how qualified I am to discuss where IRC is headed or where it should go - I've rarely had the time to think about it - for the last fourteen years I've mainly been juggling time between adding features, fixing bugs, and replying to emails, ie. trying to make mIRC a useful, stable, and fun IRC client. I can tell you one thing - I've purposefully avoided adding technologies that would turn mIRC into something more than an IRC client. At least, so far - at some point it will make sense to consider technologies that allow IRC to change direction and evolve.

I'm currently working on converting mIRC to a full unicode application - which has turned out to be a fairly difficult and time-consuming process. Hopefully IRC will still be around by the time I've finished - I'll be pretty miffed if it isn't ;-)

Marketing is all, Microsoft tried a irc client in 1998 but failed then...msn! Msn started lacking features from the old top IM (ICQ). Off-line messages is recent in Msn and in ICQ its default.
Marketing can surpass any feature.

Here in Brazil a popular network died in 2007 then few days ago I received a spam from another network (rival?) talking about new features like hostserv with colors (yeah colors in your host @_@), number of users is increasing now, but serious because of those spams small networks will never become big

Has been, is now, will always be.

Its just a shame that some people don't even know it exists. In a sea of corporate fast food chains, mIRC is the cafe around the corner that always serves the best breakfasts, with a smile.

- 6 or 7 year veteran, now returning to the fold. Can't wait to get started again.

Great analogy. I would definately hate to see golden arches on the front of my cafe, or the Disney logo, which is what some seem to want.