www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

The Beirut network celebrated its 2nd anniversary on the 21st of this month. “I’m glad to see it surviving two winters so far” network founder Stefano explained to IRC-Junkie. “Definitely it has become the main middle eastern IRC network today. But it wasn’t easy”. The event was celebrated in Beirut with toast, dinner, champagne, cakes and fireworks on a party with 164 people.

The network was founded after Stefano was experiencing problems on the former network of his choice Undernet. “I had a big channel on undernet.. #beyrouth with an average of 130 users sized and the channel site was 2000 members within one year only and 1500 profiles with photos.. I noticed that all these people had to do nothing with undernet but joined there just because of our friendship and atmosphere.”

Recently a group of AustNet admins split of from the network to form a new network named AustIRC. IRC-Junkie finds out the reasons these admins decided to split of.

“You may of have recently heard that AustNet.org is shutting down, we can confirm that this is not true.  Unfortunately, various members of our admin team decided that they wanted to seperate from the network and fork off to start their own network”, AustNet admin Ryan announced on the AustNet website. “… we do not approve of was the way in which this was done, and their trickery through FUD to get users to move to their new network.  Therefore, the word on the street that you may of have heard that we were shutting down was simply false.”

OK, this is going to be one of those rants I spit out from time to time. You know I love IRC, I use it to chat, help other users to chat and use it as a base for scientific groups because of its excellent ways to automate tasks with the help of bots. IRC evolves, new functionality is being added almost on a daily basis. And that should be a good thing. But I have to wonder, is IRC becoming too complicated for new users?

Over the past month GameSurge (ranked #9 by SearchIRC.com) have started to actively recruit new support staff. IRC-Junkie finds out what it takes to become an active member on this network.

The end of January the network posted an article on their website requesting people from European timezones to apply for support staff member. Last week a second request went out for all timezones.

“We originally requested only European applicants because were having problems supporting our userbase from those time zones”, Human Resources Manager Michael Rossi explained to IRC-Junkie. ” We received a decent response from the Europeans. We hired 10 European staff members.  After we hired them, however, we realized at that point that we could also use some more help in our American time zones.”

“To further the goal of encouraging good security habits, GameSurge has teamed up with Panda Software to host the GameSurge/Panda Software Security Giveaway”, the GameSurge website announced.

Alacard2k (IRC Operator and Support Operator) explained to IRC-Junkie that originally it was Panda Software that contacted the network for advertising possibilities on their website. “As a general rule we don’t place advertisements on our website, so I spoke to them about some alternatives. Eventually we settled on an idea that would be beneficial to everyone, a giveaway.”