It's funny that this should come up on the frontpage today, because just yesterday, I chose to go and find and install ircN, which still works just fine, by the way.

That is how I collected the quotes originally, by using ircN's quote commands, which saved them in a file called quotes.txt, IIRC.

Then, I would occasionally entertain the channel with random quotes.

Eventually, I converted quotes.txt to quotes.html and posted it on my website.

Then I built a PHP+MySQL database with a submission form, then some basic anti-abuse and moderation features.

Doesn't really answer the core part of the question - how did you fish out the funny ones?

Manually