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IRC Gateway Issues and Separating the Main Techrights IRC Channel From Non-Tech-Related Politics

Video download link | md5sum 8110a3b417e702b58dc88fb28c91c2f6 IRC Status and Changes Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: We're branching off to an old IRC channel (abandoned for many months already) and one of the Web gateways seems to be down at the moment (for all networks we've tested with), so please be patient

THE IRC network has been very busy lately (thus, also time-consuming to keep abreast of). We've split the main channel to reduce mentions of politics, as noted in the video above. Some days the political channel will be, overall, busier than the main channel.



As an aside, on the side bar one can see some technical issue. It started happening last night. KiwiIRC seems to be having technical issues since Sunday night, likely related to deployments or maintenance, so we hope it will be resolved soon (it is outside our control). Information about our IRC network and gateways can be found here. There is a fallback gateway [1, 2] anybody can use.

For those who are not yet familiar with IRC (it has been around since the 1980s and we're backward-compatible with that era), it is not a company but Free software anyone can deploy. There are many different implementations, both for clients and servers, and there are over 500 large networks all over the world (they're all independent from one another). There are quite a few standalone IRC clients and several non-Libera.Chat/Freenode networks. There's no single entity controlling IRC; not even remotely, especially since last summer; the way IRC networks are structured, they're all separate nodes in a sea of millions of servers, which can (but rarely are) connect over a bridge. The video above names our temporary (about 5 months long) usage of a bridge, specifically during a migration to our very on IRC network.

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