If you run a website or are part of a large community, you'll have wished that there was some way by which you could interact live with all the members. Forums are slow and messengers are 1-to-1. In this article, we look at Internet Relay Chat and how it can help you communicate with your community.
Whether you have a popular website or a group of people working on something, one of the most important things is communication. And while messengers and messenger conferences can be useful for certain purposes, they don't allow you to have a free-for-all chat room where anyone can join and talk with other people. Fortunately for us, IRC serves this purpose incredibly well. IRC is a shortened form of Internet Relay Chat, a place where people can connect and talk about anything under the sun. Networks and channels (chat rooms) are dedicated to various purposes, whether it's talking about movies, technical discussions, lolcats, or anything you can think about.
Since the barrier to entry for hosting your own chat room is quite low, lots of communities have popped up for all sorts of purposes. While there are popular networks like EFNet or DALnet with tens or hundreds of servers linked together, some people still setup their own networks to have complete control. In this article, we will take a look at some popular IRC servers and how you can set them up. This article will get a bit technical, depending on your comfort with tcp/ip networking and working with large configuration files through the command line.
If you're looking for a feature-filled IRC server and have a fast server to boot, Unreal will be one of the most useful for you. With a vast number of features, and an equally large number of modules (addons), you can tweak this server to your heart's content. While there are a large number of IRC daemons (server applications) today, almost all of them are forks of other server applications. For example, UnrealIRCd was a fork of EliteIRCd. They then went on to add lots of features to the codebase to make Unreal what it is today. The new version of UnrealIRCd in development right now - 4.0, is a fork of another well-known server daemon/application, InspIRCd.
UnrealIRCd runs on Windows, Linux and BSD (Unix) operating systems. You will need to download the corresponding archive for your platform. Linux and Unix archives will be source files which will have to be compiled manually before installing. The Windows archive is a pre-compiled binary which is to be installed directly. Helping you configure UnrealIRCd is beyond the scope of this article since the configuration file starts at almost 800 lines and can go up to 1500 lines depending on your configuration, but if you're comfortable with large configuration files and networking/ip-addressing, you should be good to go. The official docs are very good and will help you with whatever problems/queries you have.
UnrealIRCd Website. (As of writing, this website is down. It should hopefully be up soon)