SaberUK

There are draft specs to fix both of these but they haven't been worked on recently because nobody has the time or energy to work on it.

This is fundamentally the main problem with IRC development nowadays. People want IRC to have features but are unwilling to support IRC developers to actually implement them and as a result pretty much every single IRC developer (myself included) who isn't churning out slop is burned out because its a thankless job.

IRCv3 are the consensus-based standards body for modern IRC and has ratified the WebSocket spec. Its very unlikely there will be another IRC RFC because getting anything through the IETF is a bureaucratic nightmare. I was a reviewer for the draft IRC-CTCP RFC and it eventually died because the IETF wanted external reviewers who didn't work on the spec and that just didn't exist.

IRCv3 isn't a corporate body, its a semi-formal group of IRC developers. There's nothing prohibiting you from proposing protocol extensions if they are within the scope of the working group.

TIL that free speech is when you larp as a monarch and ban everyone who doesn't worship you.

Libera Chat is not responsible for the spam. It's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job.

The evidence suggests that is not the case. Freenode has already lost almost half of its users in the last month and the projections suggest that Libera Chat will overtake freenode in user count in just over a week and that freenode will drop to the third largest network by user count in about a month. These projections have been pretty optimistic for freenode over the last few weeks too, the reality of the situation has shown freenode lose users faster than the projections forecast.

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/

Yeah I heard that. It's GPLv2 licensed so he's free to use it (if he can even migrate his services database without corrupting it) but his lackies have been informed that they will be banned on sight if they try to ask for support.

https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/ and https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php are useful.

The former has PRIVMSG (message) statistics which show that Libera Chat is considerably more active than freenode despite having less total users (for now, the crossover point is predicted to be the 26th and it's been moving closer and closer for days).

I'm glad you find my work useful. :)

Within IRC culture networks exist to serve the projects and users not the other way around. Failing to understand this is why leenode is losing users in the first place.

As the maintainer of one of the more popular IRC server implementations I know a giant chunk of the Libera Chat (formerly freenode) staff pretty well and whilst we may disagree frequently on technical choices they're decent people who were appointed based on technical merit. They pretty much didn't have any say in rasengan seizing control of freenode as Christel sold out the project and lied to the other staff about what what had happened for several years. After Christel was ousted they reorganised and elected teams internally and after the network switch have developed a governance system which requires strong consensus to avoid this ever happening again.[1]

OFTC and Libera Chat aren't as different as you seem to think. There is also a lot of cooperation between the two projects which has been going on for years. Solanum is being developed as a joint project and some staff members are involved with both networks.

1: https://libera.chat/bylaws

So basically this is Hacker News but where rasengan can ban the people who are not being sufficiently idolatrous towards him?

It's a crying shame how one of the oldest surviving FLOSS community resources has been turned into a personal playground for an ancap blowhard who can't accept that no matter the amount of money he throws around it won't get people to like him.

>Current global users: 68347

A week ago freenode had 78644 users according to netsplit. Bragging about tanking your user count by 10k in a week (and its still dropping, it's at 66715 now) is a weird flex.

Not to defend rasengan (my opinion of him and his freenode tyrancy is severely negative and I fully support the actions of the ex-freenode now-Libera.Chat team) but as someone who previously had access to the Snoonet servers and as the developer of the open source IRC server software that Snoonet uses (InspIRCd) I can confirm that there was no message intercept ability on Snoonet as of a few months ago when I resigned. No SSH access was given to rasengan on any servers all of which were locked down pretty heavily to a small subset of staff including formerly myself.

I think it is very unlikely that any surveillance capacity has been added since I resigned given that the remaining volunteers (who were not appointed by rasengan and many of whom predate rasengan's ownership of the network) are decent people who would not tolerate that. InspIRCd also makes it very hard to surveil users without them knowing (and I've made it harder since becoming the lead maintainer) as it sends notices to all users on connect if rawio debug mode is enabled and all loaded modules are listed in `/MODULES` which is explicitly exempt from being disabled in the config. Being open source it's technically possible to disable these checks by editing the source but from what I have seen rasengan is not a very good programmer[1] so he would probably not be able to do that without being caught.

[1] This mess seems typical of his programming abilities: https://github.com/toc-irc/jbnc/blob/master/bouncer.js

Whilst that is true as I have explicitly stated there is no intercept capability on the infrastructure that I have access to. If you're willing to believe some completely unverifiable logs dumped on a paste site over someone with access to IRC.com infrastructure then i'm not really sure what I can say to convince you otherwise.

You can use OTR for private IRC chats and an IRCv3 contributor is currently working on an end-to-end encryption system suitable for use in IRC channels so if you're concerned about your privacy you are welcome to use those.

As the maintainer of InspIRCd i'm biased towards it but ngircd is a pretty solid piece of software if you only want something which is simple and easy to set up without a bunch of fuss.

I have to look through the source code of other IRC server implementations regularly when checking for cross-server compatibility and looking through ngircd's source code is always a pleasure. Its extremely well written and easy to follow unlike the irc2-based IRC server implementations (UnrealIRCd, etc) which usually are a pain to find out what they're even doing.

Full disclosure: i'm being paid to work on InspIRCd for use on the IRC.com network. This is my personal opinion not an official statement on behalf of my employer.

The IRC server software used by Snoonet, InspIRCd, does not contain any functionality for message interception (it doesn't even tell server operators the contents of a message that has matched a spam filter) and at least on the infrastructure I have access to Snoonet does not have any message interception capability either.

Full disclosure: i'm being paid to work on InspIRCd for use on the IRC.com network. This is my personal opinion not an official statement on behalf of my employer.

Everything IRC.com is working on usability-wise is happening on top of the existing protocol. If you're an advanced user you'll be able to connect to the server with your IRC client of choice just like you always have to any other IRC server.

The 'tls' extension is not actually TLS support. It is a method of upgrading plaintext connections to TLS via the STARTTLS command. It has some design problems and is going to be replaced with something that works similar to HTTP Strict Transport Security in the upcoming IRCv3.3 release which will be a base standard.

We strongly believe that the future of IRC is TLS-only.

IRCv3 makes writing software easier not more complicated.

Take the "away-notify" extension for example. Without it you would have to repeatedly poll a channel with WHO to see if all users in that channel have marked themselves as away.

It is simpler for us to work on stuff by ourselves rather than getting the bureaucratic nightmare which is the IETF involved. IRC has never followed the RFCs strictly (even RFC 1459 describes a specific protocol which has never existed) so it is not too much of a problem.

There are plans to contribute an updated base RFC to the IETF in due course though.

Edited messages are on my TODO for inclusion in IRCv3.3.

>My favourite bit is how they skipped adding length negotiation and it is causing them problems already.

We are working on it but when you have hundreds of different implementations which are all broken in their own way its not as easy as just adding a way to negotiate the length. Extending the length to add an extra 512 octets for message tags was a temporary fix.

>Now if they had started with fixing the actual protocol they wouldn't have had to deal with that.

We HAVE started with working on fixing the protocol. Almost all of the specifications in IRCv3.1 and most of the specifications in IRCv3.2 fix core protocol issues.

This is not how IRCv3 works. We have contributors from almost every single major IRC network and implementation.

>ZNC guys and Atheme guys did not get along because political reasons, so they threatened to fork the project.

I do not wish to start an argument over things which are long dead. However, I think it is important to note that the "political reasons" were that you were constantly derailing discussions and threatening people.

I can publish all of my IRC logs if anyone wants evidence of this.

Almost everything you have said is false. Please cease this defamation.

>IRCv3 is an almost closed group of friends, mostly znc core developers

There is only one ZNC developer actively involved with IRCv3 (DarthGandalf) and even they have not been particularly active in the last few months.

>who have decided they can choose what the future of IRC looks like.

We accept any reasonable proposals providing you are willing to provide a strong rationale for it.

>They have put lots of pressure on and harassed other developers of clients and networks, sending them patches and infiltrating their devs if necessary, so their ideas are actually implemented.

No IRCv3 technical board member has ever forced a developer to accept patches. Some people have contributed patches to various IRC implementations in order to improve IRCv3 compliance but those patches have been accepted out of the free will of the maintainer.

>If you complain about those ideas and specs, they'll tell you to refer to their github issue tracker,

We prefer that discussions happen on the tracker rather than IRC as it is persistent and can be referred to in the future.

>they mostly ignore those who are not part of that core group I mentioned.

This is completely false. Please provide evidence of this happening.

Most music bought from iTunes has been DRM free for many years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7813527.stm

Full disclosure: I am one of the developers on the aforementioned IRC server.

In a future release InspIRCd will adopt support for the server-time extension which will allow us to get rid of the timestamp duplication if a user's client supports it.

>Our "sabre-rattling" over the Malvinas Islands was done during our vicious, murderous military dictatorship in the 70s/early 80s.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/12/argentina-falkl...

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/05/falklands-under-ou...