Not that I’m complaining, I just find it kinda interesting given how so much stuff demands you sign up & register to do much of anything on a service or site.
Is it simply a cool cultural element that’s persisted since IRC’s been around? Also shoutout to all the old hat IRC folks out there maintaining their servers and enabling drop-in questions this way, much appreciated!
The IRC protocol has no concept of registering so implementing registration is a lot of unnecessary effort.
To wit, someone else could log in with your username and people probably couldn’t tell the difference
There are service bots, that are used by many of the irc networks, that handle this within irc itself (nickserv, chanserv, etc…).
that is a beautiful thing for my registration-exhausted ass
irc predates having to register for crap. the original bots.
There are still IRC servers?
Oh yeah, plenty of them! libera.chat is by far the biggest known network right now but twitch chat is secretly an IRC network too. netsplit.de lists a whole bunch of networks!
Huh. I honestly had no idea. There were basically no people left on Dalnet and Undernet last time I was there.
Core memory unlocked
TIL,
Last time I went on IRC was more than 10 years ago, and it was already a bit “outdated nostalgia at the time”