Yakman
2009-04-12 11:25:28
-ChanServ- Information on #srl:
-ChanServ- Registered : Apr 12 21:22:07 2008 (52 weeks, 0 days, 17:20:13 ago)
Now that the IRC channel has been up and running for a year, I'll take some time to reflect back on its humble beginnings.
I remember when trying to register the srl irc channel on freenode, it had already been registered by Bebe. After a quick email, she dropped it and I took full control of #srl.
My first step was to inform Wizzup to come have a look, see if it was worth trying to get SRL intrested. After that I got SSRL intrested, and finally posted a thread on the General section to open the flood gates. The #SRL channel had gone public!
My ambition was to compete with moparisthebest's forum, to try to make a better, larger and nicer IRC channel than them, so I made mixster post this thread and made Wizzup put the irc link the scrolling marquee.
By the time the first eight or nine people joined the channel, I had finished a very simple IRC bot written in scar. Now because the scar knowledge in the community was quite high, as soon as I released it, there were 4 or 5 instances of the bot running and I remember one time when they all somehow got into a big loop with each other, something like this iirc.
<bot1> !say !say !say !say !say !say
<bot2> !say !say !say !say !say
<bot3> !say !say !say !say !say
<bot4> !say !say !say !say !say
<bot1> !say !say !say !say
….
I solved it by doing !quit which caused all the bots to terminate.
I guess that shows the power of open source, because after a while people began hacking up the bots to make them do many different things, there was a Grand Exchange price checker bot for example.
However, as Harry and Bobng know to their dismay, (annoying) irc bots are heavily discouraged in #srl today.
Anyway, I think #SRL is serving its purpose quite well, it reguarly has at least 35 people on it, and when the forums are down, it balloons up to 45+
Lets hope its still around next year.
