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Hack 12 Find Relevant Channels and Servers

If you're new to IRC, one of
the biggest problems is working out which network to use. Find a
perfect match with one of the search engines for IRC
channels.

If
you haven't got a clue which IRC network to use,
picking a random one is not always the best idea. You may find that
the one you choose doesn't cater to your interests.
A surefire method of picking the right network is to use an IRC
search
engine.

One popular IRC search engine can be found at http://irc.netsplit.de/channels. This is
maintained by Andreas Gelhausen and uses a collection of IRC bots to
connect to hundreds of IRC networks and collect data.

3.2.1 Finding Help on IRC

Let's assume that you
are new to IRC and need some help, so you enter "irc
for beginners" into the search box and click on the
Search button. This will search through all of
the IRC networks it knows about, looking for channels with
topics that match your search terms.
The results are shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1. Using the IRC search engine

The search results are presented as a list of all channels that have
topics containing the words you searched for. Each row shows the name
of the channel, the name of the network, the time the data was
collected, the number of users in the channel, and the topic of the
channel. From these results, you can decide which channel you want to
join.

If you have an IRC client installed, you can click on the
"irc://" link beneath the channel
name to automatically connect to that server and join that channel.

3.2.2 Other Interesting Statistics

You can also use the IRC

search engine
at http://irc.netsplit.de/channels to view
statistics about networks and servers. Figure 3-2
shows the growth of the freenode IRC network over the past
five years.

Figure 3-2. Plotting the growth of the freenode IRC network

This graph shows the number of users and channels over time. Why not
see how your favorite IRC network has grown?

Alex North