THE IRC channels started around spring or summer of 2008. We hadn't anticipated they'd mature the way they did, especially because IRC is relatively old technology (I first used that in the early 1990s). Posting IRC logs is a time-consuming process because of redaction-related curation. We're careful not to harm people's privacy when/where it's necessary. Many lurkers have been there for a long time, even over a decade. The more active participants are a close-knit community that sort of grew up together, talking about technology for the most part. All our IRC logs are complete; when loggers had gaps, which was a rare situation, the decentralised nature of IRC was leveraged to fuse together the missing bits. So we almost never lost any data.

"That’s thirteen eggs on the left by the way…"A month ago we devised a work pipeline or a workflow that allows us to post IRC logs every morning. We know that some people are reading those. Some cite these to make particular points or informal observations. The purpose was explained too.

We're not secretive; we never were. Obviously we make exception when it comes to source handling; in 13 years we never ever let down a source that needed protection. We hope to maintain this perfect record.

Tomorrow this site turns 13. We'll write about that separately. That's thirteen eggs on the left by the way... ⬆