October 26, 2004

Curious George: IRC server. I have a website that is needing realtime chat, but I am having trouble understanding my options. ...

I run a very large website and need a chat app. The caveat is we also have a fringe of troublemakers so we have to have moderation capabilities. Here's the different things I tried. 1. I started with PHP apps, most of which are MySQL-based. First I tried phpMyChat but everyone despised the annoying 2-sec page redraw. I then tried ZZ Flash Chat, which was better, but it has a 2 to 10 sec lag that annoys most of the users. ZZ Flash Chat also requires Flash, is resource-intensive, and offers no IRC-styled commands, though it has good admin/mod resources. The lag though seems to annoy users, and I think PHP/SQL is not cut out for chat. 2. IRC is the obvious way to go. However our hosting package prohibits IRC servers and eggdrop. Searching Google I see some references to "why would you want to host an IRC server when you can [somehow] point a subdomain to a chat server and ircop it". OK, so maybe we'll do this. 3. So how do I set up channel # on another server, and more importantly, eggdrop it or whatever so the channel isn't commandeered? Is there an online system that provides these services? We'd gladly pay for some sort of maintained/moderated IRC service, and it doesn't matter to us if it's a closed or open IRC network. One site that appears to be doing it right is DAP Central, which is used for trading MST3K episodes. They somehow map irc2.dapcentral.org to a chat server, and they have a room #dapcentral which always contains their latest announcements. I don't know how they do this and avoid commandeering and netsplits. I am really out of my league with this stuff, but we hafta have chat. Has anyone done this kind of thing on their server?

posted by rolypolyman 20 years ago
  • I haven't been on IRC for a good while, but slashnet.org does have a ChanServ to protect your channel from takeover. For free.
  • Yeah, you could simply register a channel on slashnet or something like that. Most networks have ChanServ/NickServ & the like, nowadays.
  • Also, I just registered #mofirc on slashnet.org, which was kind of inconsiderate on my part. I hope we can unregister.
  • As far as I know, you can either unregister or transfer ownership of the channel with normal chanserv services. At least you could on DALnet.
  • Oh, I just glanced over the 'DROP' command in the ChanServ help.
  • Sweet, Richer. I thought I'd already registered it, but obviously not.
  • I was on #mofirc last night, and didn't see anyone. Y'all are a bunch of player haters.
  • Oh, also roly, if you run your own BIND server to do your dns stuff, I am almost positive you can set it up to resolve irc.yourhost.com to whatever you want it to including someone elses domain. It has been a bit since I've done anything with bind, but Google should be your friend here.
  • Thanks for the great suggestions. I didn't know about Slashnet. Looks like I'm in business.
  • I actually looked it up online for you, and looked through the zone configs for my server. If, infact, you are running bind or whoever provides your DNS gives you access to A/CNAME stuff: here. Basically, what you'd do is in the zone config for your domain, under the CNAME section you'd put something like: "irc A ip.for.slashnet" That way irc.yourdomain.net would resolve to slashnet. At least, I believe that is how it will work.
  • You're not doing this for work, are you?
  • the_bone: #mofirc is almost always empty. the real players can be found at #mefi... since there are usually a few other monkeys hanging around there. /reppin' mofi
  • There are actually three people (myself, Richer and duckstab) yakking on #mofirc right now. pH33r us.
  • I am still so IRC impaired. I think I will just install Mozilla. Should I uninstall firefox first?
  • Nope, they should run independently.