IRC

thumb|upright|The first IRC server, tolsun.oulu.fi, a [[Sun-3 server on display near the University of Oulu computer centre]]

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.

Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Users connect, using a clientwhich may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger programto an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Examples of ways used to connect include the programs Mibbit, KiwiIRC, and mIRC.

IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users by 2012.

== History==

IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Computer Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented was the chat part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. The first IRC network was running on a single server named tolsun.oulu.fi. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.

Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Oikarinen to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed another server. This was the first "IRC network". Oikarinen got some friends at the Helsinki University of Technology and Tampere University of Technology "it had a wildcard server line, so people were hooking up servers and nick-colliding everyone". The "Eris Free Network", EFnet, made the eris machine the first to be Q-lined (Q for quarantine) from IRC. In wumpus' words again: It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War. Chat logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive.

Undernet fork

Another fork effort, the first that made a lasting difference, was initiated by "Wildthang" in the United States in October 1992. (It forked off the EFnet ircd version 2.8.10). It was meant to be just a test network to develop bots on but it quickly grew to a network "for friends and their friends". In Europe and Canada a separate new network was being worked on and in December the French servers connected to the Canadian ones, and by the end of the month, the French and Canadian network was connected to the US one, forming the network that later came to be called "The Undernet". was published and details a simple protocol for client/server operation, channels, one-to-one and one-to-many conversations.

Most (not all) of the IRCnet servers were in Europe, while most of the EFnet servers were in the US. This event is also known as "The Great Split" in many IRC societies. EFnet has since (as of August 1998) grown and passed the number of users it had then. In the (northern) autumn of the year 2000, EFnet had some 50,000 users and IRCnet 70,000. or obscuring a user's hostmask ("cloaking") to protect from denial-of-service attacks.

Proxy detection: Most modern servers support detection of users attempting to connect through an insecure (misconfigured or exploited) proxy server, which can then be denied a connection. This proxy detection software is used by several networks, although that real time list of proxies is defunct since early 2006.
Additional commands: New commands can be such things as shorthand commands to issue commands to Services, to network-operator-only commands to manipulate a user's hostmask.
Encryption: For the client-to-server leg of the connection TLS might be used (messages cease to be secure once they are relayed to other users on standard connections, but it makes eavesdropping on or wiretapping an individual's IRC sessions difficult). For client-to-client communication, SDCC (Secure DCC) can be used.
Connection protocol: IRC can be connected to via both IPv4 and IPv6

, a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features such as instant notifications, better history support and improved security. , no major IRC networks have fully adopted the proposed standard.

there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating, of which the open source Libera Chat, founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers; between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about one thousand servers.

After its golden era during the 1990s and early 2000s (240,000 users on QuakeNet in 2004), IRC has seen a significant decline, losing around 60% of users between 2003 and 2012, with users moving to social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, but also to open platforms such as XMPP which was developed in 1999. Certain networks such as Freenode have not followed the overall trend and have more than quadrupled in size during the same period.

The largest IRC networks have traditionally been grouped as the "Big Four"—a designation for networks that top the statistics. The Big Four networks change periodically, but due to the community nature of IRC there are a large number of other networks for users to choose from.

Historically the "Big Four" were:

Timeline

Timeline of major networks:

EFnet, 1990 to present
Undernet, 1992 to present
DALnet, 1994 to present
freenode, 1995 to 2021
IRCnet, 1996 to present
QuakeNet, 1997 to present
Open and Free Technology Community, 2001 to present
Rizon, 2002 to present
hackint, 2007 to present
HybridIRC, 2018 to present
Libera Chat, 2021 to present

Technical information

right|thumb|A screenshot of [[HexChat, an IRC client for GTK environments]]

right|thumb|[[Irssi, a text-based IRC client]]

IRC is an open protocol that uses TCP Users access IRC networks by connecting a client to a server. There are many client implementations, such as mIRC, HexChat and irssi, and server implementations, e.g. the original IRCd. Most IRC servers do not require users to register an account but a nickname is required before being connected.

IRC was originally a plain text protocol However, the de facto standard has always been to run IRC on 6667/TCP and nearby port numbers (for example TCP ports 6660–6669, 7000) to avoid having to run the IRCd software with root privileges.

The protocol specified that characters were 8-bit but did not specify the character encoding the text was supposed to use. This can cause problems when users using different clients and/or different platforms want to converse.

All client-to-server IRC protocols in use today are descended from the protocol implemented in the irc2.4.0 version of the IRC2 server, and documented in RFC 1459. Since RFC 1459 was published, the new features in the irc2.10 implementation led to the publication of several revised protocol documents (RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812 and RFC 2813); however, these protocol changes have not been widely adopted among other implementations.

Although many specifications on the IRC protocol have been published, there is no official specification, as the protocol remains dynamic. Virtually no clients and very few servers rely strictly on the above RFCs as a reference.

Microsoft made an extension for IRC in 1998 via the proprietary IRCX. They later stopped distributing software supporting IRCX, instead developing the proprietary MSNP.

The standard structure of a network of IRC servers is a tree. Messages are routed along only necessary branches of the tree but network state is sent to every server and there is generally a high degree of implicit trust between servers. However, this architecture has a number of problems. A misbehaving or malicious server can cause major damage to the network and any changes in structure, whether intentional or a result of conditions on the underlying network, require a net-split and net-join. This results in a lot of network traffic and spurious quit/join messages to users and temporary loss of communication to users on the splitting servers. Adding a server to a large network means a large background bandwidth load on the network and a large memory load on the server. Once established, however, each message to multiple recipients is delivered in a fashion similar to multicast, meaning each message travels a network link exactly once. This is a strength in comparison to non-multicasting protocols such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

An IRC daemon can be used on a local area network (LAN). IRC can thus be used to facilitate communication between people within the local area network (internal communication).

Commands and replies

IRC has a line-based structure. Clients send single-line messages to the server, receive replies to those messages and receive copies of some messages sent by other clients. In most clients, users can enter commands by prefixing them with a '/'. Depending on the command, these may either be handled entirely by the client, or (generally for commands the client does not recognize) passed directly to the server, possibly with some modification.

Due to the nature of the protocol, automated systems cannot always correctly pair a sent command with its reply with full reliability and are subject to guessing.

Channels

The basic means of communicating to a group of users in an established IRC session is through a channel. Channels on a network can be displayed using the IRC command LIST, which lists all currently available channels that do not have the modes +s or +p set, on that particular network.

Users can join a channel using the JOIN command, in most clients available as /join #channelname. Messages sent to the joined channels are then relayed to all other users. Other less common channel types include '+' channels—'modeless' channels without operators—and '!' channels, a form of timestamped channel on normally non-timestamped networks.

Modes

Users and channels may have modes that are represented by individual case-sensitive letters and are set using the MODE command. User modes and channel modes are separate and can use the same letter to mean different things (e.g. user mode "i" is invisible mode while channel mode "i" is invite only.) Modes are usually set and unset using the mode command that takes a target (user or channel), a set of modes to set (+) or unset (-) and any parameters the modes need.

Some channel modes take parameters and other channel modes apply to a user on a channel or add or remove a mask (e.g. a ban mask) from a list associated with the channel rather than applying to the channel as a whole. Modes that apply to users on a channel have an associated symbol that is used to represent the mode in names replies (sent to clients on first joining a channel

There is a small design fault in IRC regarding modes that apply to users on channels: the names message used to establish initial channel state can only send one such mode per user on the channel,

Standard (RFC 1459) modes

{| class="wikitable"

|+ User modes

! Letter

! Symbol

! Description

| i

| Invisible—cannot be seen without a common channel or knowing the exact name

| s

| Receives server notices

| w

| Receives wallops

| o

| User is an IRC operator (ircop)

{| class="wikitable"

|+ Channel modes

! Letter

! Symbol

! Parameter(s)

! Description

| o

| @

| Name of affected user

| Channel operator—can change channel modes and kick users out of the channel among other things

| s

| Secret channel—not shown in channel list or user whois except to users already on the channel

| p

| Private channel—listed in channel list as "prv" according to <nowiki>RFC 1459</nowiki>

| n

| Users cannot send messages to the channel externally

| m

| Channel is moderated (only those who hold channel operator or voice status on the channel can send messages to it)

| i

| Only users with invites may enter the channel.

| t

| Only channel operators can change the channel topic.

| l

| Limit number

| Limits number of users able to be on channel (when full, no new users can join)

| b

| Ban mask (nick!user@host with wildcards allowed)

| Bans hostmasks from channel

| v

| +

| Name of affected user

| Gives a user voice status on channel (see +m above)

| k

| New channel key

| Sets a channel key such that only users knowing the key can enter

Many daemons and networks have added extra modes or modified the behavior of modes in the above list.

Channel operators

A channel operator is a client on an IRC channel that manages the channel.

IRC channel operators can be easily seen by the symbol or icon next to their name (varies by client implementation, commonly a "@" symbol prefix, a green circle, or a Latin letter "+o"/"o").

On most networks, an operator can:

Kick a user.
Ban a user.
Give another user IRC Channel Operator Status or IRC Channel Voice Status.
Change the IRC Channel topic while channel mode +t is set.
Change the IRC Channel Mode locks.

Operators

There are also users who maintain elevated rights on their local server, or the entire network; these are called IRC operators, sometimes shortened to IRCops or Opers (not to be confused with channel operators). As the implementation of the IRCd varies, so do the privileges of the IRC operator on the given IRCd. RFC 1459 IRC servers, services, and other clients, including bots, can use it to identify a specific IRC session.

The format of a hostmask is <code>nick!user@host</code>. The hostmask looks similar to, but should not be confused with an e-mail address, distinguished by the ! to indicate a command and the Nickname.

The nick part is the nickname chosen by the user and may be changed while connected.

The user part is the username reported by ident on the client. If ident is not available on the client, the username specified when the client connected is used after being prefixed with a tilde.

The host part is the hostname the client is connecting from. If the IP address of the client cannot be resolved to a valid hostname by the server, it is used instead of the hostname.

Because of the privacy implications of exposing the IP address or hostname of a client, some IRC daemons also provide privacy features, such as InspIRCd or UnrealIRCd's "+x" mode. This hashes a client IP address or masks part of a client's hostname, making it unreadable to users other than IRCops. Users may also have the option of requesting a "virtual host" (or "vhost"), to be displayed in the hostmask to allow further anonymity. Some IRC networks, such as Libera Chat or Freenode, use these as "cloaks" to indicate that a user is affiliated with a group or project.

URI scheme

There are three provisional recognized uniform resource identifier (URI) schemes for Internet Relay Chat: <code>irc</code>, <code>ircs</code>, and <code>irc6</code>. When supported, they allow hyperlinks of various forms, including

(where items enclosed within brackets ([,]) are optional) to be used to (if necessary) connect to the specified host (or network, if known to the IRC client) and join the specified channel. (This can be used within the client itself, or from another application such as a Web browser). irc is the default URI, irc6 specifies a connection to be made using IPv6, and ircs specifies a secure connection.

Per the specification, the usual hash symbol (#) will be prepended to channel names that begin with an alphanumeric character—allowing it to be omitted. Some implementations (for example, mIRC) will do so unconditionally resulting in a (usually unintended) extra (for example, ##channel), if included in the URL.

Some implementations allow multiple channels to be specified, separated by commas.

Challenges

Issues in the original design of IRC were the amount of shared state data being a limitation on its scalability, the absence of unique user identifications leading to the nickname collision problem, lack of protection from netsplits by means of cyclic routing, the trade-off in scalability for the sake of real-time user presence information, protocol weaknesses providing a platform for abuse, no transparent and optimizable message passing, and no encryption. Some of these issues have been addressed in Modern IRC.

Attacks

Because IRC connections may be unencrypted and typically span long time periods, they are an attractive target for DoS/DDoS attackers and hackers. Because of this, careful security policy is necessary to ensure that an IRC network is not susceptible to an attack such as a takeover war. IRC networks may also K-line or G-line users or servers that have a harming effect.

Some IRC servers support SSL/TLS connections for security purposes. This helps stop the use of packet sniffer programs to obtain the passwords of IRC users, but has little use beyond this scope due to the public nature of IRC channels. SSL connections require both client and server support (that may require the user to install SSL binaries and IRC client specific patches or modules on their computers). Some networks also use SSL for server-to-server connections, and provide a special channel flag (such as <code>+S</code>) to only allow SSL-connected users on the channel, while disallowing operator identification in clear text, to better utilize the advantages that SSL provides.

IRC served as an early laboratory for many kinds of Internet attacks, such as using fake ICMP unreachable messages to break TCP-based IRC connections (nuking) to annoy users or facilitate takeovers.

Abuse prevention

One of the most contentious technical issues surrounding IRC implementations, which survives to this day, is the merit of "Nick/Channel Delay" vs. "Timestamp" protocols. Both methods exist to solve the problem of denial-of-service attacks, but take very different approaches.

The problem with the original IRC protocol as implemented was that when two servers split and rejoined, the two sides of the network would simply merge their channels. If a user could join on a "split" server, where a channel that existed on the other side of the network was empty, and gain operator status, they would become a channel operator of the "combined" channel after the netsplit ended; if a user took a nickname that existed on the other side of the network, the server would kill both users when rejoining (a "nick collision"). This was often abused to "mass-kill" all users on a channel, thus creating "opless" channels where no operators were present to deal with abuse. Apart from causing problems within IRC, this encouraged people to conduct denial-of-service attacks against IRC servers in order to cause netsplits, which they would then abuse.

The nick delay (ND) and channel delay (CD) strategies aim to prevent abuse by delaying reconnections and renames. After a user signs off and the nickname becomes available, or a channel ceases to exist because all its users parted (as often happens during a netsplit), the server will not allow any user to use that nickname or join that channel, until a certain period of time (the delay) has passed. The idea behind this is that even if a netsplit occurs, it is useless to an abuser because they cannot take the nickname or gain operator status on a channel, and thus no collision of a nickname or "merging" of a channel can occur. To some extent, this inconveniences legitimate users, who might be forced to briefly use a different name after rejoining (appending an underscore is popular).

The timestamp protocol is an alternative to nick/channel delays which resolves collisions using timestamped priority. Every nickname and channel on the network is assigned a timestampthe date and time when it was created. When a netsplit occurs, two users on each side are free to use the same nickname or channel, but when the two sides are joined, only one can survive. In the case of nicknames, the newer user, according to their TS, is killed; when a channel collides, the members (users on the channel) are merged, but the channel operators on the "losing" side of the split lose their channel operator status.

TS is a much more complicated protocol than ND/CD, both in design and implementation, and despite having gone through several revisions, some implementations still have problems with "desyncs" (where two servers on the same network disagree about the current state of the network), and allowing too much leniency in what was allowed by the "losing" side. Under the original TS protocols, for example, there was no protection against users setting bans or other modes in the losing channel that would then be merged when the split rejoined, even though the users who had set those modes lost their channel operator status. Some modern TS-based IRC servers have also incorporated some form of ND and/or CD in addition to timestamping in an attempt to further curb abuse.

Most networks today use the timestamping approach. The timestamp versus ND/CD disagreements caused several servers to split away from EFnet and form the newer IRCnet. After the split, EFnet moved to a TS protocol, while IRCnet used ND/CD.

In recent versions of the IRCnet ircd, as well as ircds using the TS6 protocol (including Charybdis), ND has been extended/replaced by a mechanism called SAVE. This mechanism assigns every client a UID upon connecting to an IRC server. This ID starts with a number, which is forbidden in nicks (although some ircds, namely IRCnet and InspIRCd, allow clients to switch to their own UID as the nickname).

If two clients with the same nickname join from different sides of a netsplit ("nick collision"), the first server to see this collision will force both clients to change their nick to their UID, thus saving both clients from being disconnected. On IRCnet, the nickname will also be locked for some time (ND) to prevent both clients from changing back to the original nickname, thus colliding again.

Clients

Client software

right|thumb|Scheme of an IRC network with [[Client (computing)|normal clients (green), bots (blue) and bouncers (orange)]]

Client software exists for various operating systems or software packages, as well as web-based or inside games. Many different clients are available for the various operating systems, including Windows, Unix and Linux, macOS and mobile operating systems (such as iOS and Android). On Windows, mIRC is one of the most popular clients. Some Linux distributions come with an IRC client preinstalled, such as Linux Mint which comes with HexChat preinstalled.

Some programs which are extensible through plug-ins also serve as platforms for IRC clients. For instance, a client called ERC, written entirely in Emacs Lisp, is included in v.22.3 of Emacs. Therefore, any platform that can run Emacs can run ERC.

A number of web browsers have built-in IRC clients, such as:

Opera used to have a client, but no longer supports IRC
ChatZilla add-on for Mozilla Firefox (for Firefox 56 and earlier; included as a built-in component of SeaMonkey).

Web-based clients, such as Mibbit and open source KiwiIRC, can run in most browsers.

Games such as War§ow, Unreal Tournament (up to Unreal Tournament 2004), Uplink, Spring Engine-based games, 0 A.D. and ZDaemon have included IRC.

Ustream's chat interface is IRC with custom authentication as well as Twitch's (formerly Justin.tv).

Bots

A typical use of bots in IRC is to provide IRC services or specific functionality within a channel such as to host a chat-based game or provide notifications of external events. However, some IRC bots are used to launch malicious attacks such as denial of service, spamming, or exploitation.

Bouncer

A program that runs as a daemon on a server and functions as a persistent proxy is known as a BNC or bouncer. The purpose is to maintain a connection to an IRC server, acting as a relay between the server and client, or simply to act as a proxy. Should the client lose network connectivity, the BNC may stay connected and archive all traffic for later delivery, allowing the user to resume their IRC session without disrupting their connection to the server.

Furthermore, as a way of obtaining a bouncer-like effect, an IRC client (typically text-based, for example Irssi) may be run on an always-on server to which the user connects via ssh. This also allows devices that only have ssh functionality, but no actual IRC client installed themselves, to connect to the IRC, and it allows sharing of IRC sessions.

To keep the IRC client from quitting when the ssh connection closes, the client can be run inside a terminal multiplexer such as GNU Screen or tmux, thus staying connected to the IRC network(s) constantly and able to log conversation in channels that the user is interested in, or to maintain a channel's presence on the network. Modelled after this setup, in 2004 an IRC client following the client–server, called Smuxi, was launched.

Search engines

There are numerous search engines available to aid the user in finding what they are looking for on IRC. Generally the search engine consists of two parts, a "back-end" (or "spider/crawler") and a front-end "search engine".

The back-end (spider/webcrawler) is the work horse of the search engine. It is responsible for crawling IRC servers to index the information being sent across them. The information that is indexed usually consists solely of channel text (text that is publicly displayed in public channels). The storage method is usually some sort of relational database, like MySQL or Oracle.

The front-end "search engine" is the user interface to the database. It supplies users with a way to search the database of indexed information to retrieve the data they are looking for. These front-end search engines can also be coded in numerous programming languages.

Most search engines have their own spider that is a single application responsible for crawling IRC and indexing data itself; however, others are "user based" indexers. The latter rely on users to install their "add-on" to their IRC client; the add-on is what sends the database the channel information of whatever channels the user happens to be on.

Many users have implemented their own ad hoc search engines using the logging features built into many IRC clients. These search engines are usually implemented as bots and dedicated to a particular channel or group of associated channels.

Character encoding

IRC still lacks a single globally accepted standard convention for how to transmit characters outside the 7-bit ASCII repertoire.

IRC servers normally transfer messages from a client to another client just as byte sequences, without any interpretation or recoding of characters. The IRC protocol (unlike e.g. MIME or HTTP) lacks mechanisms for announcing and negotiating character encoding options. This has put the responsibility for choosing the appropriate character codec on the client. In practice, IRC channels have largely used the same character encodings that were also used by operating systems (in particular Unix derivatives) in the respective language communities:

7-bit era: In the early days of IRC, especially among Scandinavian and Finnish language users, national variants of ISO 646 were the dominant character encodings. These encode non-ASCII characters like Ä Ö Å ä ö å at code positions 0x5B 0x5C 0x5D 0x7B 0x7C 0x7D (US-ASCII: [ \ ] { | }). That is why these codes are always allowed in nicknames. According to RFC 1459, { | } in nicknames should be treated as lowercase equivalents of [ \ ] respectively.

Technically, IRC provides no file transfer mechanisms itself; file sharing is implemented by IRC clients, typically using the Direct Client-to-Client (DCC) protocol, in which file transfers are negotiated through the exchange of private messages between clients. The vast majority of IRC clients feature support for DCC file transfers, hence the view that file sharing is an integral feature of IRC. The commonplace usage of this protocol, however, sometimes also causes DCC spam. DCC commands have also been used to exploit vulnerable clients into performing an action such as disconnecting from the server or exiting the client.

Citations

General bibliography

External links

IRC Numerics List
History of IRC
IRC.org – Technical and Historical IRC6 information; Articles on the history of IRC
IRChelp.org – Internet Relay Chat (IRC) help archive; Large archive of IRC-related documents
IRCv3 – Working group of developers, who add new features to the protocol and write specs for them
IRC-Source – Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network and channel search engine with historical data
irc.netsplit.de – Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network listing with historical data