What is IRC? IRC (IRC "Internet Relay Chat") is a system of instant messaging was founded by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 as ...
What is IRC?
IRC (IRC "Internet Relay Chat") is a system of instant messaging was founded by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 as an alternative to the program MUT (MultiUser Talk) who was working on the BBS in the Finnish city of Oulu. IRC based on servers scattered across the world and each server has a certain number of channels, in addition to the group chat it is available in the IRC private chat and transfer files, known as X-DCC.On May 2009, 100 IRC network became the largest around the world, with more than half a million people at the same time the number of rooms is estimated hundreds of thousands (classified all empty any where there are at least 5 users) and 1,500 Internet server dedicated for this purpose.
The most common encoding of IRC channels is Unicode UTF-8, but with the exception of some servers that uses their own encoding (especially with Windows encoding or other), and therefore users may have to change the encoding every time they enter into a server.
IRC networks and Channels
Since the appearance of IRC, several networks appeared (IRC site includes many servers) and these sites vary in terms of specialization, the fame the number of channels and the users it have.You can access any network by typing a line of text in this vein: irc://irc.network.example:port/channel.
This is a list of 10 most popular IRC networks worldwide (ranking depends on the number of channels and the number of users who walk in a day).
QuakeNet: It is the most known and the most famous network and contains approximately 95,000 channel and more than 100,000 registered users.
Undernet 21.007 channel and more than 97,000 registered users.
IRCnet: about 15,000 channel and over 83,000 registered users.
EFnet: This is one of the oldest IRC networks contains 15.038 channel and about 53,000 registered users.
Freenod: 7.114 channel and more than 46,000 registered users, this network specializing in educational projects and open source.
DALnet: This was the largest networks in the past, but they have been exposed in 2001 to DosS attacks, which led to the secession of its biggest server (Twisted) and there are currently 16.220 channel in the network and more than 27,500 registered users.
GameSerge: 19.017 channel and more than 19,000 registered users, network specializing in gaming.
WebChat: 2,286 channel and about 15,000 registered users.
Rizon: 4.653 channel and more than 14,500 registered users, a network most of its channels are channels of anime translation teams, and there are a lot of XDCC bots.
Popular ongoing IRC channels are #hottub and #riskybus. A number of channels are set up and conducted in foreign languages.
Bots
A typical use of bots in IRC is to provide IRC services or a specific functionality within a channel such as to host a chat-based game or provide notifications of external events.
Source : Wikipedia
