IRC

Ramiel

Ramiel

Blue Octahedron of Doom
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Sep 30, 2008
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All the forums I've been active on have IRC channels, except FFF...
IRC would a major improvement over the laggy little shoutbox we have. IRC has NO lag at all (Although I've experienced 1 second lag on very crowded channels... ;P), administration and moderation is easily done, there are lots of awesome scripts for it, and more. We have flood control, we have /me, we have a lot of things.
mIRC and other IRC clients are the most used way to connect to IRC networks and channels, but are also the most blocked and unnacessible at work or school.
Mibbit ( http://www.mibbit.com/ ) has a very good IRC widget that can be put in any websites. Plus, it has NO Java and NO Flash. It has ads, but actually the only ads you'll see is a periodically updated text ad that just sits in the corner and is easily ignored.
IRCHighway ( http://www.irchighway.net is also the same as Mibbit but it cannot be put on websites.

This gives a good explanation of IRC.
I can give a demonstration on IRC to a mod/admin since I use IRC a LOT. (not atm though, internet is acting gay)

Cons of IRC: No smilies (Although this also prevents smiley spamming), no text formatting other than colors (We can live without custom fonts) and sometimes (very rarely...) it's blocked by schools and workplaces. As I said, very rarely - I've seen GameFAQs being blocked but not Mibbit >_>. The 3rd con is the only bad one actually, we can live without smilies and fonts...
Pros of IRC: No cost (unless if you want a whole network of yours, which is dumb), no lag, flood & bad word control (all done automatically by bots), bots and scripts, able to freely change nicknames as long as they aren't registered, easy kick & ban, ranks - Channel Operator/Admin/+qo, SOP/+s, OP/+o, HalfOP/+h (HOP) & Voice/+v; admins can kick OPs and lower, OPs can kick halfops and lower, halfops can kick voices and lower, voices can't do anything but are usually more respected than other people 8F. Also affects scripts, thus only Voices or higher will be able to activate/use a certain script.

The pros obviously outweight the cons...
What does FFF have to say?
IRC is awesome!
 
We had one of these way back when it lagged the site to hell and back. Chances are they will decline it due to past experiences. As for the inferno SB we use that only because it doesn't lag badly unless you are on a bad connection or someone spammed it with smilies.
Basically unless you do something stupid it doesn't lag.
 
Since the server move we're currently not experiencing any problems with the shoutbox lag. We've had IRC in the past and we didn't like it. We really don't want IRC again. We also don't want any censorship going on either as we feel people should be allowed to say what they wish without it being blocked unless we feel it's something that shouldn't be said. Anyway, no most likely we're not going to have IRC. The shoutbox is working fine, except for the occasional server hiccups that LG expressed we may experience for a couple more days.
 
I wasn't saying that we should have IRC because of the shoubox lag - I was just saying that IRC is a major improvement over the SB.
Let's take scripts as an example.
There is a widely popular Uno script on IRC. You can't play Uno on the shoutbox, can you?
If I search the interwebz I can also find Blackjack scripts, Hold-Em scripts and other scripts, which are really fun to play with others!
There's also the Search Script. If you want to know all about, say, Shinryuu, instead of asking "who is shinryuu?" and waiting for a proper answer (which may take a while to come out), you can just type !search shinryuu and (as long as it's added in the search database) everything will come out in about 1 second or less.

About censorship, YOU CAN SET UP the bad words you want people to be kicked for saying them.

And sorry for asking but why exactly did we not like IRC and not want it back?
 
Are you trying to say we don't have those? If you haven't noticed we have an arcade. Why would we go to what we know is bad; just for what we already have?
 
We don't even know if our server can handle something as big as the IRC chat. The last time we had something like that on the forums is caused really crazy forum lag and pissed a lot of people off. It was before your time. I really don't feel a chat room is necessary. The shoutbox compensates fine for people who want to chat. I don't want IRC taking away forum activity.
 
WHOA WHOA WHOA
Who said anything about hosting the IRC chat on our servers?!?!?
No no no no no no no.
For IRC chat, the only use for servers is for hosting IRC networks, IIRC.
We don't need a network! We need a channel.
And a channel is hosted on a network.
And irc.Mibbit.com and irc.IRCHighway.net are 2 networks that are DEFINATELY NOT hosted on our servers and where we can host a channel or even 10 channels without anyone giving a damn. (Although 10 channels hosted by us would probably attract attention...)

And about the arcade, the arcade is single-player. IRC Scripts are multi-player.
 
Kikyou said:
We don't even know if our server can handle something as big as the IRC chat. The last time we had something like that on the forums is caused really crazy forum lag and pissed a lot of people off. It was before your time. I really don't feel a chat room is necessary. The shoutbox compensates fine for people who want to chat. I don't want IRC taking away forum activity.
Click to expand...
This isn't contributing a whole lot, but: in fairness we got that old chat room back when:-
A) we were using DB's cheap server; and
B) we still had the SB up.

So that one time we had it was a bad example, lol.
 
Shinn while I love what you are saying about this.. I want to express some concerns.

I have ran IRC channels out the arse. I have been an Operator for 20+ channels as well as Global operator for gamesnet.

1) I will say why FFF should never move to IRC though. Final Fantasy Forums uses Shout Box as an all inclusive feature to the website. IRC has ports in which generally are blocked at most major colleges and offices (including mine). This should not be about me though, because I know a lot of people still use IRC. Here's the thing, if people were to use the channel and others were not.. a lot of confusion and miss communication can occur.

2) Moderating an IRC channel is a bit tougher than moderating a shoutbox. It is a division of power for one. IRC shows alot of unbiased favoritism when it comes to +v's and @'s (you should know what I mean). I know all the commands as far as limiting users and temp bans and blacklisting people. A lot of unhealthy competition comes about too. For instance let's say someone was in the SEF and another was in the FFF channel. Well if someone were to say.. "hear" something and wanted to bot up a channel.. they could. Botting is when you flood a server with different IP's from different sources.

3) Hacking - IRC is a joke to hack. You can Kline and Gline people (basically banning their entire cable provider for certain amounts of time), but it doesn't prevent people from channel take overs. You can have things called Server Bots, in which stay in the channel and can be password protected. It's nice to have... but its not as secure as some might think.

Overall unless you are a consistent gamer or pro gamer there is no real need for it.
 
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the SB that we had back then was part of the Chat room. Also I have some experience with coding and SB's take about a tenth of the space to run as a Chat Room. This being said if you throw games into it then you are looking at huge bandwidth usage there alone.
 
@S_G, does having a button at the top of the screen with a link to www.mibbit.com use massive amounts of bandwidth? I'm not really good with servers and whatnot but I don't think it will. If the IRC Chat back then was hosted by FFF, then yeah, that's probably why you all got massive lag and stuff...

@Shu, I always use the BotServ bots, they never posed a problem to me and they can stop flooding by kicking the flooder and putting a +b on them after several kicks. And if flooding comes from over 9000 IP addresses and the flood never stops we could just slap on a +k on the channel.
About schools and work... well, there's no way fixing that.
Unless if you proxy, which will get you in massive amounts of trouble >_>
 
The button itself don't effect it, but what server in it's right mind would allow other sites to use up it's bandwidth for free? None that's who. This being said it means that FFF would have to place the coding for it in and deal with it on our server. Due to the amount of bandwidth it uses it would just cause problems.
 
Look, I'd really rather us not get IRC, especially after the issues Shu has mentioned that have arisen with them. The shoutbox is fine. We all enjoy it and we really don't need extra games as we have the Arcade as well as the RPG. I don't want something like that taking away from forum activity, nor do we really need tons of bandwidth used up, and I'm also not sure how our servers would be able to handle it.
 
Meh, I'd just rather have the SB to be honest, whilst yes IRC may bring benefits I don't think there's a huge demand for it. It all seems very gimmicky and I don't think the likes of Uno et al will benefit FFF in any way. I'm happy with the SB, I never lagged in it before really but I know there's a lot less of a problem since the server move. :)
 
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