SwiftBlog

“Musings about the IRC experience from a worthless user on IRCWorld to a NA on SwiftIRC…with a few bits in between.”

So, I’m Tim, and let’s face it most of you wouldn’t know who I am (actually, those of you who would read this are probably the type who were around when I made myself known but anyway…) .

Let’s start with what I do here, I’m a Network Administrator and I was the second new server administrator after the SwiftIRC regime change all those years ago…but why? How about some backstory?

I have been using IRC for about 8 years now (maybe 9 or 10, I’m a bit hazy there) starting out with Zybez and Lachy’s RSToolkit on IRCWorld. IRCWorld was an interesting place, full of Europeans who mostly didn’t converse in English and then there was the RuneScape part, we must have been a right pain in the arse for all those non-English Europeans…actually from memory they were mostly Estonians.

As many of you may have noticed while using SwiftIRC, the RuneScape community that follows these “toolkits” has a certain immaturity that comes along with it and while this is annoying for the average observer as long as they only have to observe it’s really not an issue, but when these users get buttons that list all the channels on a network so they can join them at their whim then things get annoying. It appears that in general there is a lack of understanding about what the chat function of these toolkits is and how it operates, the users seem to be under the impression that everything to do with the chat is to do with their application…well, anyone who is reading this probably understand just how annoying that is.

Now, at IRCWorld there was this server admin, his name was speedis, and he got involved in our RuneScape community…very involved, he was extremely pushy (putting it nicely I guess) and he had issues with playing nicely with others. After a final incident at IRCWorld speedis delinked his server (in fact was probably forced out, the stories are rather conflicting) and he created RivalIRC…well it was an appropriate name. Here Lachy followed with his RuneScape Toolkit and formed the main userbase for this network, he was given an o:line and things carried on much as before except for these cool new things called vhosts.

Now, the vhosts I speak of are the IRCd given ones, completely virtual with no ounce of reality and every man and his dog had to have one (substitute dog with bot if you want) – they were a reasonably new feature to any production IRCd and the network staff seemed to enjoy playing with them, that is until every other user seemed to want theirs changed every other day; every time someone got banned from a channel they would just go to an IRCop and get their vhost changed, stuff like that. It was a pain.

But I digress (and will rant about vhosts another day), anyway, things were going well they had a reasonable little network going with an average of 300 users or something (far more when the toolkit was set to automatically connect to IRC…that was a silly plan), Lachy had a new, higher ability to manage the chat component of his program and speedis was now overlord.

I’m not sure if it came across clearly but during this time I was just an ordinary user, like most of the people reading this, so too were people like Sephiroth and Awong and Marius. Now at the same time as these two networks were operating and we were just common users Sephiroth and I were experimenting with different IRCds on different platforms, mostly separately but occasionally as a “network”.

So anyway, back to RivalIRC. As I mentioned earlier, speedis was difficult to deal with, and Lachy was no better at it than anyone else and one day he asked me how to set up an IRCd on the shell account he had just purchased – this was essentially the birth of RuneScapeIRC…I know, shit name, blame Sephiroth. After much discussion and compiling over the next week we decided to build a network administered by Lachy, Sephiroth and myself to house the RuneScape Toolkit and other related channels (Zybez, RuneWeb/RuneNews/etc), this was supposed to sit idle for a month or two while Lachy finished off the newest version of his toolkit and the unveiling was to occur simultaneous (that new version was never finished in case you were wondering, enter the rise of SwiftSwitch).

Then there was a leak, I think it was me, irc.mydomain.net was pointing to our network and some people used that to connect to my other mini-network instead of server.otherdomain.net…naturally these people couldn’t keep their mouths shut. At about 11:30 PM the next day we got some awkward news, “se.eu.rivalirc.net is rehashing…”, Lachy’s o:line was gone from that server…speedis was pissed.

Oh, sidenote, Lachy and I lived in Australia, Sephiroth in the UK, speedis in Sweden. Great time for the Europeans, shit time for us Southern Hemisphere, Pacific dwellers.

Right, so the current server admin was chucking a fit over our little plan to ease him out, plans had to be pushed forward and at 4am the next morning we had a new, live network full of users. That was a stressful 4 hours in a way I have not since experienced, there’s something about the stress of setting up an IRC network that is about to have an influx of users with no “real” experience that is just different to everything else.  A few of you might remember that the IRCd we used was called ViagraIRCd, now that’s an inappropriate name for a network full of kids and on a night full of issues the number of PMs and channel highlights which are just silly jokes about the name are really annoying at first but after a while…well it did become pretty funny. The IRCd was awesome though, for its time it was a nice mix between supreme stability of bahamut and the features of Ultimate/Unreal.

So our network ran pretty well, we got to try some new things and learn about the failures that are statistics packages, services packages and shell/vps hosts. We had a problem though, our main user base was RS Toolkit and Lachy was becoming inactive, he was hardly maintaining his product and eventually was never here at all; this became an issue as RuneScape evolved in ways that the existing product couldn’t maintain and Strider3282’s SwiftSwitch (I can’t remember the clan name whose world switcher it originally was so we’re calling it SwiftSwitch) was progressively bridging the gap between just begin a world jumper to a full featured toolkit product.

While we were maintaining our dwindling network (I say dwindling but the user numbers never really dropped they just stayed the same) Sephiroth was taking over FluxIRC where Runedude and Trent were in charge. Runedude was someone we had both known for a long time, since IRCWorld in fact, at this stage he was also one of my customers and the server that was green.fluxirc.net was hosted by me. As a result of this takeover Runedude and Trent were forced out, Hussam stayed, Sephiroth became boss (he still is in case you hadn’t noticed). The domain was Runedude’s and he took it with him to try and rebuild, but that failed, the network was effectively just renamed SwiftIRC and everything continued as normal because Strider decided to stick with Seph.

Now Sephiroth had a growing network, and it was growing pretty fast, he needed servers and I offered one (this was back in February 2007 according to NickServ…wow 3 years). I never intended to actually get involved in SwiftIRC, initially I was just offering infrastructure this was because I didn’t really like SwiftIRC, I had had dealings here in the past and while I was always treated with respect (all the current staff were my users at one stage) and pretty much got to do as I liked the users bothered me quite a bit. Frankly, a lot of the users still bother me quite a bit. Anyway, we decided to close RuneScapeIRC and move all our remaining users to SwiftIRC so ultimately I got properly involved anyway.

Oh, I missed a bit. A while before the last paragraph I had started making people IRCops on RuneScapeIRC (before this it was just the 3 of us) in particular there was Marius, Awong and Scott. At this stage Scott was an IRCop at SwiftIRC too.

Right, so around this time we basically had 1 network and we’re up to the HelpOps. When I first came to SwiftIRC the support network consisted of IRCops and a few individuals who were given operator status in #irchelp, it was decided that there should be a more structured support system so we let users fill in applications and we chose 20 “Help Operators”, of which 2 were Awong and Marius.

Since then the HelpOp system has changed several times, how #irchelp has operated has changed about as many. Frankly as far as I’m concerned the HelpOp group is fairly worthless as a support mechanism, but it’s quite good as a screening process for potential IRCops and many have come from this group: Awong, Marius, Steve|, Hutchins, Slaapkamer, Sara, Pancakes, Remy and Mithshark for a start.

Now that’s a brief overview of me starting on IRC to now, with a bit more emphasis on some parts than others (and not necessarily the most important bits) but the more key points that drove me to being here now. Now, as I mentioned at the start most of you probably don’t know me, that’s because for most of the last year I’ve been somewhat idle here, observing how things happen. To me IRC has always been something of a social experiment, and the perspective of a user is vastly different to that of a very involved administrator which is vastly different to that of an observing administrator. Unfortunately I can’t really comment on what it’s like to be a HelpOp (although I hear it’s unpleasant) and my experience of being an IRCop only was even more unusual than being an IRCop at SwiftIRC is.  From all of this I’ve found that IRC can be an absolutely fascinating thing and it’s certainly as interesting to experience as it is to observe…but at its core it’s still just multiplayer notepad.

I’ve basically ignored all the big structural events at SwiftIRC as they don’t really fit into an article of unstructured memories and musings such as this one but if anyone wants an explanation as to how, what or why something has happened at SwiftIRC (or RuneScapeIRC before that) over the last few years I can probably give some insight into it.

As a final thought, let’s list the servers I have run at SwiftIRC since coming here.

phoenix.il.us.swiftirc.net – Chicago, Illinois, USA.
griffin.mo.us.swiftirc.net – St. Louis, Missouri, USA. (was also green.fluxirc.net)
zeus.au.oc.swiftirc.net – Western Australia, Australia.
titan.fl.us.swiftirc.net – Jacksonville, Florida, USA.