IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

When you started your own network this is probably the first question that came to your mind the second after everything was up and running – “Now, how do i get a few more users in here?”.

With over 5000 IRC networks in existence, chances are slim to none that someone actually stumbles over your network and sets up the channel for his users on it.

But fret not, in this post we’ll outline a few ways to attract users to your network and also talk about a few do’s and don’ts when promoting it – read on.

AndChat (previously known as AndroidIRC), a free and powerful IRC client for the Android platform, has been updated and is now available at version 1.2.8.

AndChat Channelview

The free – although not Open Source’d – client provides a great number of features such as multi-server and SSL support, highlights and notifications, timestamps, a scrollback buffer and nick-completion – and it reportedly works with all major bouncers.

AndChat Options Menu

The new version, available since today, has a few bugfixes and new features added:

wsIRC, a new webchat client, is now at version 1.0 – their first release version.

wsIRC Channelview

As you can see from the screenshot, the most important functions are already there: right-click menus for miscellaneous functions such as /WHOIS or /PRIVMSG’ing users, a Channel-Central to handle the most basic modes and bans. Registering your nick or channel through a simple popup is implemented and the usual buttons for smileys, font-color and style are available too.

The ZNC bouncer project has released another version in their stable tree and is now available as version 0.080.

ZNC Webinterface

Despite the still low version number, ZNC sports a huge amount of useful features of which most are dynamically loadable (or unloadable) due to its modular structure.

Full SSL support, buffer playback, Twitter integration and even a Webinterface that provides full control over the bouncer are just a few of the features it comes with.

The new version has loads of minor and major bugfixes and also a few feature additions which can be found in the changelog here.

ratbox-services, a services package for use with IRCd-ratbox is now available as version 1.2.3 in their stable tree.

ratbox services logo

They are “highly configurable, with nearly all options being set in a config that can be rehashed rather than set at compile time. It also uses the SQLite database backend, which works as a database interface to a normal file, meaning no seperate database software must be running”.

The new release has some feature additions for their channel listing service, ALIS, which now lets you search for channels with the +S mode (SSL-only channels). This release also fixes a +S/ALIS related “minor buffer overflow” at the same time.