thinking about how hacking on ircd as a kid was a cope for being unable to be a trans kid (i grew up in oklahoma, in the 90s, the *vocabulary* did not exist, much less any feasible form of support)
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i think in a lot of ways IRC became a catch-all for maladjusted youth who didn't have other outlets.
i kind of tried to allude to this in my psychoanalysis of the freenode kerfluffle 5 years ago.
in that piece, i found that i could understand andrew lee's motivations quite well.
to borrow a metaphor from final fantasy 9: perhaps andrew lee became IRC's kuja. what he did was wrong (destroy freenode), but his heart was in the right place (preserve IRC).
anyway. i got introduced to IRC at the same time that i got introduced to GNU/Linux: although my dad had an SGI machine, my own computer was a hand-me-down pentium 133 running windows 95.
a friend of mine in real life was enthusiastic about GNU/Linux and gave me a burned CD with mandrake linux on it. i forget the specific version, it's not important. i eventually settled on slackware, spending allowance money on a money order to buy the official release CD.
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anyway. i got introduced to IRC at the same time that i got introduced to GNU/Linux: although my dad had an SGI machine, my own computer was a hand-me-down pentium 133 running windows 95.
a friend of mine in real life was enthusiastic about GNU/Linux and gave me a burned CD with mandrake linux on it. i forget the specific version, it's not important. i eventually settled on slackware, spending allowance money on a money order to buy the official release CD.
when i first started using slackware, i was basically clueless. i had no idea what i was doing.
but, at that time, slackware directed folks to join #slackware on DALnet for help, so I did. DALnet became a space where I enjoyed hanging out quite a bit, because it was filled with interesting people to talk to.
but... DALnet had a policy of tolerance toward "warez" channels: channels which had XDCC bots in them that you could use to download pirated content.
BitTorrent didn't exist yet, everyone was using either IRC or USENET for that.
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anyway. i got introduced to IRC at the same time that i got introduced to GNU/Linux: although my dad had an SGI machine, my own computer was a hand-me-down pentium 133 running windows 95.
a friend of mine in real life was enthusiastic about GNU/Linux and gave me a burned CD with mandrake linux on it. i forget the specific version, it's not important. i eventually settled on slackware, spending allowance money on a money order to buy the official release CD.
@ariadne SGI machine
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when i first started using slackware, i was basically clueless. i had no idea what i was doing.
but, at that time, slackware directed folks to join #slackware on DALnet for help, so I did. DALnet became a space where I enjoyed hanging out quite a bit, because it was filled with interesting people to talk to.
but... DALnet had a policy of tolerance toward "warez" channels: channels which had XDCC bots in them that you could use to download pirated content.
BitTorrent didn't exist yet, everyone was using either IRC or USENET for that.
@ariadne dcc send virus.exe
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when i first started using slackware, i was basically clueless. i had no idea what i was doing.
but, at that time, slackware directed folks to join #slackware on DALnet for help, so I did. DALnet became a space where I enjoyed hanging out quite a bit, because it was filled with interesting people to talk to.
but... DALnet had a policy of tolerance toward "warez" channels: channels which had XDCC bots in them that you could use to download pirated content.
BitTorrent didn't exist yet, everyone was using either IRC or USENET for that.
DALnet's tolerance policy towards warez channels would wind up biting them in the ass.
in late 2002, a new network called Rizon was started by nessun and acidst0rm.
their strategy to gain users was to:
- DDoS DALnet servers
- join the largest channels (which were warez ones) and invite them to use Rizon instead.because of the disruptions, friends from DALnet created their own networks and #slackware moved to the Open Projects Network which later rebranded to freenode.
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DALnet's tolerance policy towards warez channels would wind up biting them in the ass.
in late 2002, a new network called Rizon was started by nessun and acidst0rm.
their strategy to gain users was to:
- DDoS DALnet servers
- join the largest channels (which were warez ones) and invite them to use Rizon instead.because of the disruptions, friends from DALnet created their own networks and #slackware moved to the Open Projects Network which later rebranded to freenode.
@ariadne oh yes, sigh, we lived through those DoSes. very annoying.
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DALnet's tolerance policy towards warez channels would wind up biting them in the ass.
in late 2002, a new network called Rizon was started by nessun and acidst0rm.
their strategy to gain users was to:
- DDoS DALnet servers
- join the largest channels (which were warez ones) and invite them to use Rizon instead.because of the disruptions, friends from DALnet created their own networks and #slackware moved to the Open Projects Network which later rebranded to freenode.
sidebar: people used to ask me why i hosted techrights for so long, despite techrights becoming increasingly problematic.
the answer is simple, i've known roy since DALnet #slackware.
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i think in a lot of ways IRC became a catch-all for maladjusted youth who didn't have other outlets.
i kind of tried to allude to this in my psychoanalysis of the freenode kerfluffle 5 years ago.
in that piece, i found that i could understand andrew lee's motivations quite well.
to borrow a metaphor from final fantasy 9: perhaps andrew lee became IRC's kuja. what he did was wrong (destroy freenode), but his heart was in the right place (preserve IRC).
@ariadne interesting perspective, thanks for that. it reminds us of that thing about how, when nostalgia is allowed to be purely backwards-looking, it winds up reinforcing hierarchical world-views.
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sidebar: people used to ask me why i hosted techrights for so long, despite techrights becoming increasingly problematic.
the answer is simple, i've known roy since DALnet #slackware.
in general, my IRC friends moved into two streams
OPN (which became freenode) became the place for techie stuff, and me and my fellow IRC friends built a succession of IRC networks for everything else we were talking about.
the final iteration of that network being one called staticbox.
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in general, my IRC friends moved into two streams
OPN (which became freenode) became the place for techie stuff, and me and my fellow IRC friends built a succession of IRC networks for everything else we were talking about.
the final iteration of that network being one called staticbox.
and from there we come to how I started hacking on ircd.
we wanted to improve the software on our IRC network in order to make it more suitable for our needs.
first, we ran unrealircd and epona as most naive IRC network operators did at the time. it was great: you could run both on Windows, despite this being a horrid idea for reliability and scalability.
epona quit being maintained and got forked into anope.
meanwhile, OPN added a feature to dancer-ircd called +q (quiet lists). you could use these to mute people who were being annoying.
so i thought "how hard could it be to add this?", despite not knowing a fucking thing about writing code or anything.
but i toiled and toiled and eventually i hacked this feature into unrealircd.
but i did it in a really stupid way: unrealircd uses +q for "channel owner" mode, but i wanted it to be like OPN's +q instead. so i renamed unrealircd's +q to +y.
needless to say that ircd was buggy as hell because i didn't know what the fuck i was doing.
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and from there we come to how I started hacking on ircd.
we wanted to improve the software on our IRC network in order to make it more suitable for our needs.
first, we ran unrealircd and epona as most naive IRC network operators did at the time. it was great: you could run both on Windows, despite this being a horrid idea for reliability and scalability.
epona quit being maintained and got forked into anope.
meanwhile, OPN added a feature to dancer-ircd called +q (quiet lists). you could use these to mute people who were being annoying.
so i thought "how hard could it be to add this?", despite not knowing a fucking thing about writing code or anything.
but i toiled and toiled and eventually i hacked this feature into unrealircd.
but i did it in a really stupid way: unrealircd uses +q for "channel owner" mode, but i wanted it to be like OPN's +q instead. so i renamed unrealircd's +q to +y.
needless to say that ircd was buggy as hell because i didn't know what the fuck i was doing.
@ariadne when did +y become +b ~q: (now +b ~quiet:)? -
System shared this topic
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and from there we come to how I started hacking on ircd.
we wanted to improve the software on our IRC network in order to make it more suitable for our needs.
first, we ran unrealircd and epona as most naive IRC network operators did at the time. it was great: you could run both on Windows, despite this being a horrid idea for reliability and scalability.
epona quit being maintained and got forked into anope.
meanwhile, OPN added a feature to dancer-ircd called +q (quiet lists). you could use these to mute people who were being annoying.
so i thought "how hard could it be to add this?", despite not knowing a fucking thing about writing code or anything.
but i toiled and toiled and eventually i hacked this feature into unrealircd.
but i did it in a really stupid way: unrealircd uses +q for "channel owner" mode, but i wanted it to be like OPN's +q instead. so i renamed unrealircd's +q to +y.
needless to say that ircd was buggy as hell because i didn't know what the fuck i was doing.
so, anywho, the first irc network i started blew up and split into two forks due to my lack of skills to keep it running.
at the time, it was a body blow, but in retrospect, it makes sense that people were upset that i was shoving unproven ircd patches out there and hoping for the best.
they just wanted to a place to chill.
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so, anywho, the first irc network i started blew up and split into two forks due to my lack of skills to keep it running.
at the time, it was a body blow, but in retrospect, it makes sense that people were upset that i was shoving unproven ircd patches out there and hoping for the best.
they just wanted to a place to chill.
another sidebar: one of the forks went on to create another ircd, from scratch, written in C# called openircd. it used a thread for every connected socket. it was also very unstable and the instability was comical, because it would spam exception logs to all of the connected IRCops.
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another sidebar: one of the forks went on to create another ircd, from scratch, written in C# called openircd. it used a thread for every connected socket. it was also very unstable and the instability was comical, because it would spam exception logs to all of the connected IRCops.
@ariadne the era before async was hilarious
I mean that line of thinking predates epoll/kqueue which were still very new and very difficult to reason about, and select/poll sucked ass.
The thing was that was “the thing to do” back then: use a thread per connection because “concurrency.” Because it was better than forking per connection, and people wanted answers besides select/poll, and I don’t think people got accustomed to async thinking. Especially Windows devs. It doesn’t scale of course.
