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?
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
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.
danielbln 1 days ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
cyberlurker 1 days ago [-]
There was definitely competition for most post count and some forums had reputation.
dmonitor 4 hours ago [-]
You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
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.
g0db1t 12 hours ago [-]
As a certified Swede - Which one is this?
diggan 10 hours ago [-]
Not sure I'd certify you if you're unable to recognize Flashback by description ;)
Meekro 1 days ago [-]
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.
silisili 21 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 10 hours ago [-]
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.
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
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.
AuryGlenz 1 days ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
slifin 10 hours ago [-]
With LLMs we are starting to get the technology where comments could be programmatically rated by more interesting scales than upvotes
5 hours ago [-]
p_ing 22 hours ago [-]
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.
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
> 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 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.
danielbln 1 days ago [-]
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.
wsatb 1 days ago [-]
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.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
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.
olyjohn 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
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.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
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.
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
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.
sph 22 hours ago [-]
A low-tech compromise that I find preferable to list or tree is what YouTube does, by having one-level deep trees.
dfxm12 1 days ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
anthk 12 hours ago [-]
Discord it's a turd. It's a silo. And, if Discord deletes a group, good luck backing up your data. Gone. Forever.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
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.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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:
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
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.
olyjohn 13 hours ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
s_dev 1 days ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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?
This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to share?
diggan 22 minutes ago [-]
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!
sph 22 hours ago [-]
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”
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
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.
pabs3 1 days ago [-]
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.
its-summertime 16 hours ago [-]
The maintainer did a public statement asking for interested contributors to message him but no one practical did.
pabs3 13 hours ago [-]
I did and was rejected.
Suppafly 22 hours ago [-]
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.
boxed 1 days ago [-]
A year ago seems like very new when talking about an IRC client to me.
vkaku 16 hours ago [-]
HexChat was maintained for a good 14 years and had a final release last year. It requires active community maintenance to stay alive:
mIRC is more than that, considering its currently the only client with full IRCv3 support
Urgo 1 days ago [-]
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
>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.
alecsm 1 days ago [-]
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.
sph 22 hours ago [-]
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.
tymscar 21 hours ago [-]
Please do write about that. It would be a shame to not have any material about it!
mike503 1 days ago [-]
Same. One of my first forays into scripting. TCL for eggdrops too. Spent a lot of time and energy on IRC :)
chrisvalleybay 1 days ago [-]
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!
alecsm 1 days ago [-]
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.
anthk 12 hours ago [-]
It's the reverse. Unix text clients predate Mirc. Not weechat, but others.
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?
riffraff 1 days ago [-]
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.
diggan 1 days ago [-]
> 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".
TrackerFF 6 hours ago [-]
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.
nobleach 1 days ago [-]
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.
patwolf 1 days ago [-]
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.
nly 9 hours ago [-]
And if you clicked his nose it used to squeak.
raluk 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jackvalentine 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bn-l 1 days ago [-]
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).
cainxinth 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ndegruchy 1 days ago [-]
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.
Thoreandan 1 days ago [-]
I registered my copy. I also remember that in the Help->About, if you clicked Khaled Mardam-Bey's nose it would squeak.
sph 6 hours ago [-]
Haha you unlocked a core memory. Now that you mention it, I vividly remember the sound
crazymoka 1 days ago [-]
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.
Rodeoclash 1 days ago [-]
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.
Suppafly 22 hours ago [-]
>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.
Delk 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Scoundreller 12 hours ago [-]
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 :)
nly 9 hours ago [-]
Well file transfers via DCC (the IRC transfer mechanism) are direct. The receiver connects directly to your machine or visa versa.
syeare 2 hours ago [-]
HexChat dies, mIRC lives?!
languagehacker 1 days ago [-]
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.
ceautery 1 days ago [-]
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.
aaronmdjones 1 days ago [-]
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!
That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it'd be worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.
Suppafly 22 hours ago [-]
>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.
that_guy_iain 1 days ago [-]
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 remember the good old days with mIRC though, before I moved to Linux, so maybe when I was 11-12 or younger?
opan 1 days ago [-]
Is it still proprietary and Windows-only?
bolognafairy 1 days ago [-]
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.
futurecat 1 days ago [-]
it seems so, yes.
joemazerino 1 days ago [-]
The mIRC connection sound will always have a place in my heart. I think Slack distinctly ripped it off.
kelsey978126 1 days ago [-]
I'm so sorry, forgive me but has there been a release? What exactly is the news here?
thebetatester 1 days ago [-]
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
jsheard 1 days ago [-]
Someone has to keep the IRC lights on for when Discord inevitably runs out of money and implodes.
echelon 1 days ago [-]
Discord makes $600M in ARR (2023) and they haven't even started with a real ads effort or enterprise tools yet.
justin66 1 days ago [-]
> Discord makes $600M in ARR
Eventually they'll run out of ships to pillage, matey. But IRC will still be there.
echelon 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
anthk 12 hours ago [-]
Tech and science group are still on. The same with Usenet, and we have misc.news.internet-discuss too.
bolognafairy 1 days ago [-]
And what does the last R in ARR stand for again?
switch007 22 hours ago [-]
ARR is an industry standard! It's an important metric! Our investors are only interested in that figure!
Quick, look over there!
futurecat 1 days ago [-]
yes, and this is a 30 year old software maintained by a solo dev. It's an incredible piece of internet history.
saturn8601 1 days ago [-]
WinRAR is also about to turn 30 in a few days.
blenderob 1 days ago [-]
Did you not even click on the link before commenting?
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.
blenderob 1 days ago [-]
Fair point. The link of this post should be updated to the news page.
1 days ago [-]
kilpikaarna 1 days ago [-]
mIRC turns thirty this year also
Rendered at 19:07:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to share?
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”
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.
>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.
https://hexchat.github.io/news/2.16.2.html
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
"X but in Rust" seems like the primary purpose for Rust to exist as far as I can tell.
/s
If it works, don't fix it...
I read HN in hexchat, on Libera.chat ##hntop...
mIRC was at some point the most popular Windows IRC client, but that's about it.
0. https://www.amirc.org/
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...
That almost alleviates my guilt over having used it forever without paying for it.
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.
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.
NoNameScript was extremely inspiring in that regard. Not to mention the color theme of Brevduva Script.
Good times!
We have WeeChat now but IRC doesn't feel the same. It was the Instagram of our time.
But, perhaps, we're just not young anymore.
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".
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 downloaded this version to see if that was still the case, and sadly the about page no longer includes a photo.
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.
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.
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.
But IRC was exempt or under the radar :)
Honestly I'd probably still be using it if DALnet hadn't been DDoS'ed for months on end.
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 had no idea mIRC was still being actively developed!
https://xkcd.com/1782
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.
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
mIRC 7.81 has been released! (April 9th 2025)
Whoa!
I remember the good old days with mIRC though, before I moved to Linux, so maybe when I was 11-12 or younger?
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.
Eventually they'll run out of ships to pillage, matey. 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.
Quick, look over there!
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?