2024-05-16 IRC forever!
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You know the joke, right? In the far future, somebody, somewhere,
still wants to use IRC.

XKCD called it, many years ago

I've been working on a bot that can connect to both Discord and IRC.
It connects to Discord because this is where I found people to game
with. Discord comes with audio chat. It catapulted my gaming to a
whole new level. So much so that I decided that I'd be a paying
customer. Still, I want to be prepared for the day when Discord goes
down. When it inevitably missteps and becomes untenable. I want to
have systems ready to go.

The idea is to have something read that does chat for us all.

Behind the curtains, I run an IRC server using ngIRCd. I was able to
configure it and I was able to federate with @kyonshi@dice.camp's IRC
server. IRC has been federated for all these years and it's so
incredibly light weight, very much unlike XMPP and Matrix and the
other options I've seen.

There are a number of web-based IRC clients that give it a
Discord-like user interface. I personally run two instances of The
Lounge, one that's free for all and one with accounts. If you
register for an account, you can upload a small amount of files for
easy image sharing and the like and it also keeps logs for you (so you
don't have to learn how to use an IRC "bouncer").

Other options would be Kiwi IRC or IRC Cloud, if you want a paid
service.

The bot I was talking about is called Norn. Right now we have an
#open-table or #next-games channel on the Discord servers where
people announce their games. As players sign up, the messages get
edited. It's not really events, it's not reminders, it's not a
calendar, but it's simple and it works. You can search it. But if
you're on IRC, it doesn't work so well. So Norn does that.

On one of the Discord server, there's a bot called Wettergoblin (the
weather goblin) that keeps track of in-game events. Every channel has
its own time-axis and you can get an export of all the events. This is
great for coordinating the many games in the same setting, each
happening in their own channel. I really wanted something like that
but instead of using in-game time, I wanted to use real time. This
simplified the requirements for me, so Norn does a bit of that. The
Wettergoblin also does in-game weather, keeps a Greyhawk calendar,
shows a timeline comparing where the various channels are compared to
each other and all of that, which Norn doesn't do.

Norn also acts as a dice bot and as a knowledge repository.

Game dates, sign-ups, in-game events, knowledge base, all of that
happens per channel. It's great!

If you look at the bilingual help page of the bot on a phone, prepare
for a bit of confusion as the German and the English bits are
interleaved. On a bigger screen, you'd get two columns…

​#IRC #RPG ​#RPG