As someone who grew up on Windows + mIRC + vBulletin forums (late 90s, early 00s), mIRC will always ignite fond memories :)
For those who still use IRC, but maybe on other platforms than Windows, HexChat could be considered a spiritual successor to mIRC, but it's also open source and available on a ton of platforms. Just a happy user here, not affiliated in any way.
Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago. I still use it without problems, but maybe people could share any active forks if they know about them?
I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date the highest form of discussing many topics online.
Not only they are alive and the best resource for many things (modding, hardware, radio, photography, specific car brands) but I swear 99% of work-related discussions would benefit from having a forum as their central hub, instead of the split of slack/teams/jira/mails/videocalls.
That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its time, but I think we found better solutions now.
> Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?
As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me.
Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.
I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums.
Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.
One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.
I think something threaded similar to Reddit but without voting would be a nice middle ground. My biggest gripe with vBulletin style is how replies to earlier comments work and are so out of order.
We could score comments with sentiment analysis. AI, though not necessarily LLMs, can do it very well. Depending on how child comments reflect on the parent, the parent could be scored for relevance, agreement, helpfulness, or any other metric. This would also fuzz the metric itself (karma), and make it hard to game. The Goodhart's law problem in social media (karma farming, ratio-ing, etc) could be solved.
Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.
But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.
You're misinterpreting the role of the vote/downvote button I fear.
The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what you agree on" button.
Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on, you don't have to answer.
From HN's guidelines:
> Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.
From Reddit's Reddiquette:
> If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
Sure, but when everyone else uses the upvote/downvote button that way it doesn’t matter how you personally use it. The end result is anything that goes against the hivemind gets suppressed.
I’ve had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see that their preconceived notions were probably wrong. It’s no wonder politics has become more insular.
Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.
Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.
Say something minimally negative about macOS in /r/macos. You'll be -1 in no time.
I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15 is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15 configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.
Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!
Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote == disagree/opinion I don't like.
I always thought slashdot had an interesting concept with meta moderators. Their job was to look at how someone moderated a comment and verify if it was moderated correctly. If it was that moderator was giving more moderation points (how many times they could up/down vote something). If it wasn’t they lost points.
You would be randomly asked to meta moderate random moderations.
I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.
They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.
> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)
You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.
With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.
I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.
Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.
Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else. I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.
Have we? I think vBulletin has mostly been replaced with Twitter and Reddit, which are often very difficult to surface information from.
I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.
Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that really not me being outsider but just how it was?
It's at least suitable as an archive. Tickets just end up being a place where information and lessons die once the problem is closed out. Sometimes impossible to find an old ticket without considerable searching.
I mean, have you tried to search a Facebook group, or any of the modern social media? There's not even any way to organize things, except for maybe some sticky posts. Forums were broken up into all sorts of sub-topics, and you could search them by actual keywords, and use real filters. These days the search just shows you shit that they want you to engage with, not what's actually relevant. A well moderated and curated forum is extremely easy to find information on without even searching.
You're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.
Hear hear, so sad that many forums disappeared, although as you say, many are still alive. The first (Swedish) forum I was active on, is still around with new threads being posted once every 10 minutes or so, and lots of active discussions. So it's not all doom and gloom, but I do agree I wish more communities used regular forums.
I think the flat list of comments is strictly worse than a tree for representing a conversation.
Although in other ways I do agree with your sentiment. The discussions happening there were usually of higher quality and nuance than you see online now. There are many factors to that though, including some that have nothing to do with vBulletin itself.
The problem with a tree is if the discussion gets long eventually several branches reach a point where someone being discussed in one is just a variation of what is being discusses in a different once and you need to bring the two back.
Yeah, there's no good/bad solution to this, albeit I would say that today an hybrid of a vBulletin-like forum with task planning capabilities (ala GH Projects, where pretty much every entity is a GH issue) with a sprinkle of AI you can ask stuff for would meet 99.9% of my needs.
Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't. More than considering what the "best" platform is, I wish my org would pick one thing in each category and stick with it. We don't need teams AND slack. We don't need teams AND zoom... I think that's where the real problem lies. It's harder to get comfortable with the software this way.
> Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't
Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great.
> I think that's where the real problem lies
That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy.
The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.
People are pushing Discord to be something it's not.
Discord is a replacement for IRC and Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble. It's NOT a replacement for forums or subreddits, no matter how much people try to push it as one.
Yeah, you can't easily back up all your discussions, but most people weren't doing that with IRC anyways.
How? I'm aware that it's the single most used forum software across the English Internet, but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.
> but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.
Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:
Forums can be great, but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". That makes it hard to follow the latest discussions. The few that do have that concept are great, search them out.
Every time I logged into a forum, it would highlight all the unread posts. The latest post pushed the thread to the top. I'm not sure what forums you used that weren't like that. PHPBB and vBulletin both did that by default.
> but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this".
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there.
Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.
They are terrible -- there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit. The voting system is far superior to any FIFO out Pringles can of comments.
It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can follow along. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png
Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity sorting?
Atm, not easy indeed, it's hacked together code that barely works as-is, with a config that would be an even bigger mystery. Best hope is that I someday feel like cleaning it up and open sourcing it, alternatively you write something simple yourself :) Sorry!
Voting systems indirectly operate as propaganda that tells you what to believe and how to conform with the hive mind. “Good thought” is conveniently found at the top with a large number of virtual points, “bad thought” is hidden for you at the bottom in harder-to-read colour.
I surely am not the only one that often skips to comments without even reading the article, which is tantamount to saying “I don’t have time to form my own opinion. Tell me what to believe about this topic”
I have a different theory about why people don't read the articles: we miss forums where you could just start a conversation about something because you want to discuss it. Most articles get submitted to reddit and HN because someone is saying "hey guys, want to have a conversation about _____?" and they get upvoted because people say "sure, let's discuss that!" and the article is incidental to that.
I use HN and reddit because they are a source of interesting third party articles on random topics that then can be discussed in depth. Forums are a source of original discussion on a given topic. Those are very different things that meet very different needs.
HexChat has been explicitly abandoned, and the former maintainer didn't want it continued under other maintainers. No major forks yet, but Debian has a couple extra patches.
I started feeling bad about having used mIRC for 20ish years without paying for it so I switched to HexChat. It does everything I need and has a simpler interface, but I do sometimes miss the hacked up pirated copies of mIRC that were customized with scripts to do different things.
>Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago.
Pretty sure it's had security updates more recent than that, but I don't really pay attention.
For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
I know I shouldn't be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC in the 90s/2000's and they probably didn't expect it to still be around and updated to this day, but expiring something sold as lifetime just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They should have honored all previous lifetime licenses and just made new ones follow the new rules.
You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and post 2016
> For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
That does not seem to hold true..
I do recall that the older licenses expired, but my current active mIRC license was issued September 2018.
I have been using the license I bought in 2010 for the last 15 years now. I have, since then, ended up purchasing several licenses for friends and none have had issues updating. I recently just reinstalled using that 2010 license.
He will retain the information for a license for up to a year to retrieve it again
Looks like this no longer is included in the FAQ, but here is an archived copy directly on mirc's website about the lifetime license going away. It looks like the lifetime ones were downgraded into 10 year ones. It looks like at least when this FAQ was live you could email him and ask for a new one for free once it did expire so that was nice, but unsure if that is still being honored as the FAQ has now been removed [2]. He did try to make you feel bad about emailing though asking.
Full text copied from [1] for ease of reading
>> Question: I have an old registration that is not working, can you help?
Answer: When I originally offered a lifetime license in 1995, it seemed like a kind and fair thing to do. However, I did not expect that I would still be working on mIRC twenty-five years later. The lifetime license means that I am still supporting and providing updates to every user that has ever registered. This has become gradually more difficult and has reached the point where, sadly, it is just no longer possible. If your registration is over ten years old, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated. If you register again, you will receive an updated registration automatically. If you cannot afford to register again, or would rather not, that's okay, just email me. However, please be aware that it will take time for me to reply.
That's enough to make me glad I never bought a license before and excited to never buy a license again. After all, why should I enter into an agreement that can be unilaterally voided by the other party?
I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.
I remember doing an "AI" bot that you could talk to. If it recognized any words you said it would get a random predefined string from a .txt and send it to you. And a lot of "hacking" scripts. Fun times.
Same. In the 2000s the mIRC scripting scene was buzzing, so many interesting scripts pushing the boundaries of the language to the point of binding directly into the Win32 API to do pretty much anything. We had music players, custom GUIs, bots, colour themes, all hand crafted by teenagers. I used to spend all my days chatting and browsing mircscripts.org
It’s weird how that scene has just disappeared and no one seems to have written about it in retrospective. I keep thinking I should be the one to write about an article about that long lost art, but it’s so long ago and memory is a bit hazy.
I was so annoyed when I moved to Linux and I had to chat with KVIRC which was so inflexible and rigid compared to mIRC.
> I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.
You could write entire projects in mIRC, there was more or less nothing you could not do.
You can write custom UIs, use raw TCP/UPP sockets.. you could write mIRC in mIRC.
It was in its time quite empowering. Very few languages were mature enough to truly compete with it for simplicity in it's time (even Visual Basic, which would win out on UI, but lose on sockets etc)
Same. mIRC scripting was really what motivated me to learn to program. I had tinkered a little bit with BASIC before that, but mIRC was what kept me interested. It's one thing to write uninteresting "hello world" CLI apps, but mIRC scripting was something you and your friends could immediately interact with. I wonder if kids today have something similar...maybe Roblox scripting?
yeah I think the "this is immediately useful for me" part of mIRC scripting was a key driver in pushing kids to learn programming, and it seems lost in modern times.
That, but also Discord is basically what people use on computers for communication today, and Discord also has bots.
Of course, you cannot just willy-nilly write your own client for a Discord bot without dealing with tons of hassle, compared to how easy it is to write something that uses the IRC protocol, so not sure it's the same "instant gratification".
IRC is what everyone used for group/channel chats back when I grew up, out in rural Norway. Most towns had their #town channels, down to some very small hamlets that are barely populated today. Man, all the memories.
Always had some joker that had download some nefarious script (legit script-kiddies), that they'd share on the channels - and eventually get permabanned from.
Then MSN messenger became popular, and kind of drove away the more casual users. And after that social media became a thing, and the rest is history. Haven't really used IRC in 20 years now. The people that continued to use IRC were mostly gamers, for team chats etc. But I guess discord killed that, too.
I haven't used mIRC since the 5.X days, but I recall the author always included an updated profile photo in the about page. It was interesting to watch him age with each release update.
I downloaded this version to see if that was still the case, and sadly the about page no longer includes a photo.
We had a school server. It was so exciting back then. Having long, live conversations with people by text was a new thing. It was the first time I had spoken to people in that form at my school and had seen their “text” personality (which is different to what you get IRL).
I learned programming using mIRC scripting. There used to be bunch of quiz chaneles about trivia. I logged channel to collect questions and then wrote script that provided response after some time based on linear function k + n*len(response). That was my fist piece of software I wrote. mirc scrpting based on event system was super nice system to work with. Later I also wrote chat bot and i collected have some funny conversations with strangers.
If I still used Windows, I would still use mIRC. I bought a copy ages ago and it's still one of my favorite clients. Highly customizable and fast as hell.
Started my mp3 collection with mIRC client. I believe my first mp3 was Killing in the Name by RATM followed up by Sober by Tool.
Showed my friend how to play music on the computer and they were blown away.
The good old days.
Finding help for SQL, programming was a lot faster than today for some subjects.
Sometimes I pop into HexChat but the servers I used to use aren't there or not as good. Freenode? I think it was called.
Undernet on the #zeraw channel is where I spent a bit of time hanging out. You'd trade open FTP servers, I assume sysadmins had misconfigured them, that other users had uploaded games to.
Games used to be split by disk files, i.e. 1.44mb individual files, and I would download 1 - 10 overnight while my friend would grab 11 - 20. We'd later call each other and use Zmodem to build a full set each.
It was a hell of a time to be on the internet, for sure.
Security was basically non-existent or so badly implemented that it was a joke.
Some fond memories of my early teenage years:
- Causing net splits to steal ops / takeover IRC channels
- As part of a warez group, using site to site FTP transfers to move massive (at that time) amounts of warez without being limited by my 14400 modem
- How crazy easy it was to crash/DOS pretty much any computer on the internet
- Taking over company networks just for fun, and putting in backdoors that drove the sysadmins nuts
Yeah, I was a shithead teenager, and am sincerely sorry to the sysadmins I messed with, as I am a sysadmin myself now.
Eventually I ended up having many FBI-instigated meetings with the RCMP Commercial Crimes Division... They had boxes upon boxes of paper printouts from sniffing my connections.
I think I got off partially because of my age (about 14). But also the fact that the telecom company I was using had illegally sniffed incoming telnet sessions to my Linux box before there was any warrant, and had logged in using credentials they had sniffed to read many personal emails between my brother and myself, and other friends that used the system.
I realized what they were doing pretty quickly, but, I'm pretty sure their recklessness in doing that is what saved my butt in the end. This was a big crown corp telecom company.
I totally forgot about warez being backwards sometimes. I still visit #bookz but don't really pirate games and other media much anymore. Piracy really is a service issue and not a pricing problem once you're an adult with real money.
Freenode kind of got destroyed after the organization operating it was sold, and the new owner made changes that caused lots of volunteers to resign. Channels and people mostly moved over to Libera Chat.
For anyone who remembers that drama about lifetime licences being suspended unless you email him and have a whinge - this pissed me off immensely but a few months ago I tried my old licence that had stopped working and it worked again so I guess awful policy reversed.
mIRC was my favorite app back in the '90s. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to spend like two days downloading The Decline from NOFX over a 56k dial-up connection.
Honestly I'd probably still be using it if DALnet hadn't been DDoS'ed for months on end.
This brings back memories. I developed the "JoTrivia" mIRC script back around 2000/2001 as a way to kill time when I worked nighttime tech support and got maybe two calls a night. The scripting language syntax was completely bonkers, e.g.,
on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }
Loads of fun, though, and IRC was nice venue back then to build a community out of strangers who had similar blocks of free time.
>That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it'd be worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.
Honestly, I'm surprised the author hasn't monetized it better by stealing back the features that were stolen by discord. Make some mIRC hosted servers and an easier way to connect to them by making them the defaults when you launch the program and such. Build in support for graphics and voice chat, etc.
Not really. It was around the same time Napster blew up and became worth tons of money. Realistically, it was probably worth millions at its peak and is probably worth a million or so now.
Edit: The company's filing says they have 1.2 million in assets. So realistically, to buy the company, you're looking at a few million. It's a 2 man show so I suspect they would want a few million or so to give up that revenue stream
I spent my high school years on 14.4, 28.8, and finally 56k modems. When I got to college, I got my first taste of broadband, and boy did it get me in trouble. I would be up all night trading files on mIRC.
I'm quite happy with irssi, just figured it was worth checking. Lots of stuff becomes free software if it sticks around long enough. Blender is a big one that was originally proprietary, I believe. I did check Wikipedia before posting and "get my answer", but I also considered that it could be out-of-date, or that there could be something in the works that the loyal users would know about, maybe a blog post about plans to liberate it in the future. Asking here seemed like a surefire way to double-check, but admittedly the answer was not that important or relevant to me, yeah.
It appears there has. I didn't realize mIRC was even still being developed but by the looks of it it's actually quite actively developed https://www.mirc.com/news.html
To be fair, the front page news section doesn't even have a date next to the 7.81 release entry. I clicked it to see if there was a date, but at first glance the page just looked like a time capsule. The title of this post doesn't even mention the release.
As someone who grew up on Windows + mIRC + vBulletin forums (late 90s, early 00s), mIRC will always ignite fond memories :)
For those who still use IRC, but maybe on other platforms than Windows, HexChat could be considered a spiritual successor to mIRC, but it's also open source and available on a ton of platforms. Just a happy user here, not affiliated in any way.
Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago. I still use it without problems, but maybe people could share any active forks if they know about them?
I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date the highest form of discussing many topics online.
Not only they are alive and the best resource for many things (modding, hardware, radio, photography, specific car brands) but I swear 99% of work-related discussions would benefit from having a forum as their central hub, instead of the split of slack/teams/jira/mails/videocalls.
That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its time, but I think we found better solutions now.
> Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?
As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me.
Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.
There was definitely competition for most post count and some forums had reputation.
You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.
I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums.
Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.
One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.
As a certified Swede - Which one is this?
Not sure I'd certify you if you're unable to recognize Flashback by description ;)
I'd forgotten how much I miss this. If you disagree with someone, you have to reply and explain why-- you can't just downvote and move on.
I think something threaded similar to Reddit but without voting would be a nice middle ground. My biggest gripe with vBulletin style is how replies to earlier comments work and are so out of order.
We could score comments with sentiment analysis. AI, though not necessarily LLMs, can do it very well. Depending on how child comments reflect on the parent, the parent could be scored for relevance, agreement, helpfulness, or any other metric. This would also fuzz the metric itself (karma), and make it hard to game. The Goodhart's law problem in social media (karma farming, ratio-ing, etc) could be solved.
Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.
But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.
I agree, these days I hate using forums that don't have a tree view. Unfortunately, I don't know of any software like that, except reddit.
You're misinterpreting the role of the vote/downvote button I fear.
The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what you agree on" button.
Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on, you don't have to answer.
From HN's guidelines:
> Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.
From Reddit's Reddiquette:
> If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
Sure, but when everyone else uses the upvote/downvote button that way it doesn’t matter how you personally use it. The end result is anything that goes against the hivemind gets suppressed.
I’ve had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see that their preconceived notions were probably wrong. It’s no wonder politics has become more insular.
HN is better than most, thankfully.
> HN is better than most, thankfully.
Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.
Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.
With LLMs we are starting to get the technology where comments could be programmatically rated by more interesting scales than upvotes
Say something minimally negative about macOS in /r/macos. You'll be -1 in no time.
I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15 is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15 configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.
Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!
Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote == disagree/opinion I don't like.
I always thought slashdot had an interesting concept with meta moderators. Their job was to look at how someone moderated a comment and verify if it was moderated correctly. If it was that moderator was giving more moderation points (how many times they could up/down vote something). If it wasn’t they lost points.
You would be randomly asked to meta moderate random moderations.
> That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?
There's rarely reasons for that.
Example on MBWorld:
https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/
Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):
https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13
I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.
They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.
> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)
You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.
With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.
I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.
Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.
Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else. I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.
Have we? I think vBulletin has mostly been replaced with Twitter and Reddit, which are often very difficult to surface information from.
I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.
Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that really not me being outsider but just how it was?
It's at least suitable as an archive. Tickets just end up being a place where information and lessons die once the problem is closed out. Sometimes impossible to find an old ticket without considerable searching.
I mean, have you tried to search a Facebook group, or any of the modern social media? There's not even any way to organize things, except for maybe some sticky posts. Forums were broken up into all sorts of sub-topics, and you could search them by actual keywords, and use real filters. These days the search just shows you shit that they want you to engage with, not what's actually relevant. A well moderated and curated forum is extremely easy to find information on without even searching.
You're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.
Hear hear, so sad that many forums disappeared, although as you say, many are still alive. The first (Swedish) forum I was active on, is still around with new threads being posted once every 10 minutes or so, and lots of active discussions. So it's not all doom and gloom, but I do agree I wish more communities used regular forums.
I think the flat list of comments is strictly worse than a tree for representing a conversation.
Although in other ways I do agree with your sentiment. The discussions happening there were usually of higher quality and nuance than you see online now. There are many factors to that though, including some that have nothing to do with vBulletin itself.
The problem with a tree is if the discussion gets long eventually several branches reach a point where someone being discussed in one is just a variation of what is being discusses in a different once and you need to bring the two back.
Yeah, there's no good/bad solution to this, albeit I would say that today an hybrid of a vBulletin-like forum with task planning capabilities (ala GH Projects, where pretty much every entity is a GH issue) with a sprinkle of AI you can ask stuff for would meet 99.9% of my needs.
A low-tech compromise that I find preferable to list or tree is what YouTube does, by having one-level deep trees.
Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't. More than considering what the "best" platform is, I wish my org would pick one thing in each category and stick with it. We don't need teams AND slack. We don't need teams AND zoom... I think that's where the real problem lies. It's harder to get comfortable with the software this way.
> Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't
Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great.
> I think that's where the real problem lies
That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy.
The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.
Discord it's a turd. It's a silo. And, if Discord deletes a group, good luck backing up your data. Gone. Forever.
People are pushing Discord to be something it's not.
Discord is a replacement for IRC and Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble. It's NOT a replacement for forums or subreddits, no matter how much people try to push it as one.
Yeah, you can't easily back up all your discussions, but most people weren't doing that with IRC anyways.
How? I'm aware that it's the single most used forum software across the English Internet, but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.
> but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.
Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:
Forums can be great, but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". That makes it hard to follow the latest discussions. The few that do have that concept are great, search them out.
Every time I logged into a forum, it would highlight all the unread posts. The latest post pushed the thread to the top. I'm not sure what forums you used that weren't like that. PHPBB and vBulletin both did that by default.
> but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this".
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there.
Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.
I used (and ran) phpBB-based forums back in 2007, and even then it would tell you which threads have new posts for you to see.
They are terrible -- there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit. The voting system is far superior to any FIFO out Pringles can of comments.
> there is a reason you're using hacker news
It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can follow along. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png
Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity sorting?
> Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png
This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to share?
Atm, not easy indeed, it's hacked together code that barely works as-is, with a config that would be an even bigger mystery. Best hope is that I someday feel like cleaning it up and open sourcing it, alternatively you write something simple yourself :) Sorry!
Voting systems indirectly operate as propaganda that tells you what to believe and how to conform with the hive mind. “Good thought” is conveniently found at the top with a large number of virtual points, “bad thought” is hidden for you at the bottom in harder-to-read colour.
I surely am not the only one that often skips to comments without even reading the article, which is tantamount to saying “I don’t have time to form my own opinion. Tell me what to believe about this topic”
I have a different theory about why people don't read the articles: we miss forums where you could just start a conversation about something because you want to discuss it. Most articles get submitted to reddit and HN because someone is saying "hey guys, want to have a conversation about _____?" and they get upvoted because people say "sure, let's discuss that!" and the article is incidental to that.
> there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit
It's a good place to talk stuff that's popular, but discussions fade and die quickly.
Also, I still use vBulletin-like forums.
Examples from the last decade I still use: mbworld.org for discussing Mercedes cars, bitcointalk, hwupgrade, overclockers.uk and some others.
Reddit/Twitter absolutely cannot replace any of those I listed for long lasting specific discussions, they are just unfit.
I use HN and reddit because they are a source of interesting third party articles on random topics that then can be discussed in depth. Forums are a source of original discussion on a given topic. Those are very different things that meet very different needs.
HexChat has been explicitly abandoned, and the former maintainer didn't want it continued under other maintainers. No major forks yet, but Debian has a couple extra patches.
The maintainer did a public statement asking for interested contributors to message him but no one practical did.
I did and was rejected.
A year ago seems like very new when talking about an IRC client to me.
I started feeling bad about having used mIRC for 20ish years without paying for it so I switched to HexChat. It does everything I need and has a simpler interface, but I do sometimes miss the hacked up pirated copies of mIRC that were customized with scripts to do different things.
>Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago.
Pretty sure it's had security updates more recent than that, but I don't really pay attention.
wouldn't the more logical course of action be to pay for mirc? the devs do not benefit from you "no longer pirating" by switching to another client.
HexChat was maintained for a good 14 years and had a final release last year. It requires active community maintenance to stay alive:
https://hexchat.github.io/news/2.16.2.html
And my favorite mIRC plugin, ircN!
omg yes! ircN was the best!
Halloy is a nice IRC client. Written in Rust and has a beautiful icon.
halloy now supports image embeds too, which is awesome given that has become "table-stakes" with how prevalent Discord is
And it's time for my biweekly shoutout to iced, the wonderful GUI library used by halloy
https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
Sometimes old things don’t need a rewrite just for the sake of language-based advertising.
>Sometimes old things don’t need a rewrite just for the sake of language-based advertising.
"X but in Rust" seems like the primary purpose for Rust to exist as far as I can tell.
Well, remember you always have the choice to be informed instead.
Ah yes, Rust IRC clients of the 1990s always trigger my fond nostalgia of the old Internet.
/s
hexchat definitely has roots on xchat which in turn was inspired by amIRC[0].
mIRC was at some point the most popular Windows IRC client, but that's about it.
0. https://www.amirc.org/
mIRC is more than that, considering its currently the only client with full IRCv3 support
> seems like last version was a year ago
If it works, don't fix it...
I read HN in hexchat, on Libera.chat ##hntop...
For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
I know I shouldn't be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC in the 90s/2000's and they probably didn't expect it to still be around and updated to this day, but expiring something sold as lifetime just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They should have honored all previous lifetime licenses and just made new ones follow the new rules.
You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and post 2016
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160215000000*/https://www.mirc...
>In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
That almost alleviates my guilt over having used it forever without paying for it.
> For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
That does not seem to hold true..
I do recall that the older licenses expired, but my current active mIRC license was issued September 2018.
> now you get licenses only for a year
I have been using the license I bought in 2010 for the last 15 years now. I have, since then, ended up purchasing several licenses for friends and none have had issues updating. I recently just reinstalled using that 2010 license.
He will retain the information for a license for up to a year to retrieve it again
Looks like this no longer is included in the FAQ, but here is an archived copy directly on mirc's website about the lifetime license going away. It looks like the lifetime ones were downgraded into 10 year ones. It looks like at least when this FAQ was live you could email him and ask for a new one for free once it did expire so that was nice, but unsure if that is still being honored as the FAQ has now been removed [2]. He did try to make you feel bad about emailing though asking.
Full text copied from [1] for ease of reading
>> Question: I have an old registration that is not working, can you help? Answer: When I originally offered a lifetime license in 1995, it seemed like a kind and fair thing to do. However, I did not expect that I would still be working on mIRC twenty-five years later. The lifetime license means that I am still supporting and providing updates to every user that has ever registered. This has become gradually more difficult and has reached the point where, sadly, it is just no longer possible. If your registration is over ten years old, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated. If you register again, you will receive an updated registration automatically. If you cannot afford to register again, or would rather not, that's okay, just email me. However, please be aware that it will take time for me to reply.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201001000000*/https://www.mirc...
[2] https://www.mirc.com/pfaq.html#registration
That's enough to make me glad I never bought a license before and excited to never buy a license again. After all, why should I enter into an agreement that can be unilaterally voided by the other party?
I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.
I remember doing an "AI" bot that you could talk to. If it recognized any words you said it would get a random predefined string from a .txt and send it to you. And a lot of "hacking" scripts. Fun times.
Same. In the 2000s the mIRC scripting scene was buzzing, so many interesting scripts pushing the boundaries of the language to the point of binding directly into the Win32 API to do pretty much anything. We had music players, custom GUIs, bots, colour themes, all hand crafted by teenagers. I used to spend all my days chatting and browsing mircscripts.org
It’s weird how that scene has just disappeared and no one seems to have written about it in retrospective. I keep thinking I should be the one to write about an article about that long lost art, but it’s so long ago and memory is a bit hazy.
I was so annoyed when I moved to Linux and I had to chat with KVIRC which was so inflexible and rigid compared to mIRC.
Please do write about that. It would be a shame to not have any material about it!
Same. One of my first forays into scripting. TCL for eggdrops too. Spent a lot of time and energy on IRC :)
> I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.
You could write entire projects in mIRC, there was more or less nothing you could not do.
You can write custom UIs, use raw TCP/UPP sockets.. you could write mIRC in mIRC.
It was in its time quite empowering. Very few languages were mature enough to truly compete with it for simplicity in it's time (even Visual Basic, which would win out on UI, but lose on sockets etc)
Me too! I still remember /perform, and even more fondly when I figured out how to create dialogs that would then trigger slash commands.
NoNameScript was extremely inspiring in that regard. Not to mention the color theme of Brevduva Script.
Good times!
NoNameScript was the last standing mIRC script. It was sad to see it dying.
We have WeeChat now but IRC doesn't feel the same. It was the Instagram of our time.
It's the reverse. Unix text clients predate Mirc. Not weechat, but others.
Gosh, that brings back memories! I remember having so much fun coding my own trivia bots in mIRC Scripting Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language) over 20 years ago.
Same. mIRC scripting was really what motivated me to learn to program. I had tinkered a little bit with BASIC before that, but mIRC was what kept me interested. It's one thing to write uninteresting "hello world" CLI apps, but mIRC scripting was something you and your friends could immediately interact with. I wonder if kids today have something similar...maybe Roblox scripting?
yeah I think the "this is immediately useful for me" part of mIRC scripting was a key driver in pushing kids to learn programming, and it seems lost in modern times.
But, perhaps, we're just not young anymore.
> maybe Roblox scripting
That, but also Discord is basically what people use on computers for communication today, and Discord also has bots.
Of course, you cannot just willy-nilly write your own client for a Discord bot without dealing with tons of hassle, compared to how easy it is to write something that uses the IRC protocol, so not sure it's the same "instant gratification".
IRC is what everyone used for group/channel chats back when I grew up, out in rural Norway. Most towns had their #town channels, down to some very small hamlets that are barely populated today. Man, all the memories.
Always had some joker that had download some nefarious script (legit script-kiddies), that they'd share on the channels - and eventually get permabanned from.
Then MSN messenger became popular, and kind of drove away the more casual users. And after that social media became a thing, and the rest is history. Haven't really used IRC in 20 years now. The people that continued to use IRC were mostly gamers, for team chats etc. But I guess discord killed that, too.
Just here to bask in the nostalgia. I hit up bash.org from time to time just to remember what was... and what will probably never be again.
I haven't used mIRC since the 5.X days, but I recall the author always included an updated profile photo in the about page. It was interesting to watch him age with each release update.
I downloaded this version to see if that was still the case, and sadly the about page no longer includes a photo.
And if you clicked his nose it used to squeak.
This was a neat easter egg I never forgot about. I wonder how many people discovered it.
We had a school server. It was so exciting back then. Having long, live conversations with people by text was a new thing. It was the first time I had spoken to people in that form at my school and had seen their “text” personality (which is different to what you get IRL).
I learned programming using mIRC scripting. There used to be bunch of quiz chaneles about trivia. I logged channel to collect questions and then wrote script that provided response after some time based on linear function k + n*len(response). That was my fist piece of software I wrote. mirc scrpting based on event system was super nice system to work with. Later I also wrote chat bot and i collected have some funny conversations with strangers.
If I still used Windows, I would still use mIRC. I bought a copy ages ago and it's still one of my favorite clients. Highly customizable and fast as hell.
Started my mp3 collection with mIRC client. I believe my first mp3 was Killing in the Name by RATM followed up by Sober by Tool. Showed my friend how to play music on the computer and they were blown away. The good old days. Finding help for SQL, programming was a lot faster than today for some subjects.
Sometimes I pop into HexChat but the servers I used to use aren't there or not as good. Freenode? I think it was called.
Undernet on the #zeraw channel is where I spent a bit of time hanging out. You'd trade open FTP servers, I assume sysadmins had misconfigured them, that other users had uploaded games to.
Games used to be split by disk files, i.e. 1.44mb individual files, and I would download 1 - 10 overnight while my friend would grab 11 - 20. We'd later call each other and use Zmodem to build a full set each.
Fun time to be on the internet.
It was a hell of a time to be on the internet, for sure.
Security was basically non-existent or so badly implemented that it was a joke.
Some fond memories of my early teenage years:
- Causing net splits to steal ops / takeover IRC channels
- As part of a warez group, using site to site FTP transfers to move massive (at that time) amounts of warez without being limited by my 14400 modem
- How crazy easy it was to crash/DOS pretty much any computer on the internet
- Taking over company networks just for fun, and putting in backdoors that drove the sysadmins nuts
Yeah, I was a shithead teenager, and am sincerely sorry to the sysadmins I messed with, as I am a sysadmin myself now.
Eventually I ended up having many FBI-instigated meetings with the RCMP Commercial Crimes Division... They had boxes upon boxes of paper printouts from sniffing my connections.
I think I got off partially because of my age (about 14). But also the fact that the telecom company I was using had illegally sniffed incoming telnet sessions to my Linux box before there was any warrant, and had logged in using credentials they had sniffed to read many personal emails between my brother and myself, and other friends that used the system.
I realized what they were doing pretty quickly, but, I'm pretty sure their recklessness in doing that is what saved my butt in the end. This was a big crown corp telecom company.
>Undernet on the #zeraw
I totally forgot about warez being backwards sometimes. I still visit #bookz but don't really pirate games and other media much anymore. Piracy really is a service issue and not a pricing problem once you're an adult with real money.
Freenode kind of got destroyed after the organization operating it was sold, and the new owner made changes that caused lots of volunteers to resign. Channels and people mostly moved over to Libera Chat.
A lot of universities quickly did traffic shaping/limits to p2p apps (outside of the internal file sharing networks).
But IRC was exempt or under the radar :)
Well file transfers via DCC (the IRC transfer mechanism) are direct. The receiver connects directly to your machine or visa versa.
I registered my copy. I also remember that in the Help->About, if you clicked Khaled Mardam-Bey's nose it would squeak.
Haha you unlocked a core memory. Now that you mention it, I vividly remember the sound
For anyone who remembers that drama about lifetime licences being suspended unless you email him and have a whinge - this pissed me off immensely but a few months ago I tried my old licence that had stopped working and it worked again so I guess awful policy reversed.
mIRC was my favorite app back in the '90s. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to spend like two days downloading The Decline from NOFX over a 56k dial-up connection.
Honestly I'd probably still be using it if DALnet hadn't been DDoS'ed for months on end.
This brings back memories. I developed the "JoTrivia" mIRC script back around 2000/2001 as a way to kill time when I worked nighttime tech support and got maybe two calls a night. The scripting language syntax was completely bonkers, e.g.,
on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }
Loads of fun, though, and IRC was nice venue back then to build a community out of strangers who had similar blocks of free time.
I've never used mIRC (I use WeeChat under tmux), but I use IRC every day; I have for almost two decades.
I had no idea mIRC was still being actively developed!
How is the future in 2078?
https://xkcd.com/1782
That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it'd be worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.
>That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it'd be worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.
Honestly, I'm surprised the author hasn't monetized it better by stealing back the features that were stolen by discord. Make some mIRC hosted servers and an easier way to connect to them by making them the defaults when you launch the program and such. Build in support for graphics and voice chat, etc.
Not really. It was around the same time Napster blew up and became worth tons of money. Realistically, it was probably worth millions at its peak and is probably worth a million or so now.
Edit: The company's filing says they have 1.2 million in assets. So realistically, to buy the company, you're looking at a few million. It's a 2 man show so I suspect they would want a few million or so to give up that revenue stream
The mIRC connection sound will always have a place in my heart. I think Slack distinctly ripped it off.
I spent my high school years on 14.4, 28.8, and finally 56k modems. When I got to college, I got my first taste of broadband, and boy did it get me in trouble. I would be up all night trading files on mIRC.
Why does mIRC distributes ca certs file and what is the usecase here? Just curious.
Latest News
mIRC 7.81 has been released! (April 9th 2025)
Whoa!
Let's hope development continues until 2051. https://xkcd.com/1782.
I still prefer screen + irssi. :D
I remember the good old days with mIRC though, before I moved to Linux, so maybe when I was 11-12 or younger?
Don’t forget to bring a large trout
Ooooh I forgot about that! thank you! :D
Is it still proprietary and Windows-only?
This is something you could easily see for yourself, so this is certainly a rhetorical question.
To which I’ll respond: the world doesn’t owe it to you to make all software usable on your operating system of choice. There’s no freedom in that.
I'm quite happy with irssi, just figured it was worth checking. Lots of stuff becomes free software if it sticks around long enough. Blender is a big one that was originally proprietary, I believe. I did check Wikipedia before posting and "get my answer", but I also considered that it could be out-of-date, or that there could be something in the works that the loyal users would know about, maybe a blog post about plans to liberate it in the future. Asking here seemed like a surefire way to double-check, but admittedly the answer was not that important or relevant to me, yeah.
It's so lightweight, I can't imagine WINE couldn't handle it.
If you're on an ARM Mac, then...live with the consequences of your choices.
it seems so, yes.
HexChat dies, mIRC lives?!
I'm so sorry, forgive me but has there been a release? What exactly is the news here?
It appears there has. I didn't realize mIRC was even still being developed but by the looks of it it's actually quite actively developed https://www.mirc.com/news.html
Someone has to keep the IRC lights on for when Discord inevitably runs out of money and implodes.
Discord makes $600M in ARR (2023) and they haven't even started with a real ads effort or enterprise tools yet.
> Discord makes $600M in ARR
Eventually they'll run out of ships to pillage, matey. But IRC will still be there.
> But IRC will still be there.
IRC is a wasteland. It was once vibrant, but now it's a shell of what it once was.
Tech and science group are still on. The same with Usenet, and we have misc.news.internet-discuss too.
And what does the last R in ARR stand for again?
ARR is an industry standard! It's an important metric! Our investors are only interested in that figure!
Quick, look over there!
yes, and this is a 30 year old software maintained by a solo dev. It's an incredible piece of internet history.
WinRAR is also about to turn 30 in a few days.
Did you not even click on the link before commenting?
Right on that page is -
> mIRC v7.81 has been released.
which links to https://www.mirc.com/news.html with info about the new release from April 9th 2025.
Granted it would have been better if this post linked to https://www.mirc.com/news.html
Can some change the link to https://www.mirc.com/news.html? Mods?
To be fair, the front page news section doesn't even have a date next to the 7.81 release entry. I clicked it to see if there was a date, but at first glance the page just looked like a time capsule. The title of this post doesn't even mention the release.
Fair point. The link of this post should be updated to the news page.
mIRC turns thirty this year also