irc

This article is in response to a request by Ryan Jung. Request your own article. One of the disadvantages of using IRC over another chat medium is the lack of logging while you aren’t connected to the server. In this article, I will describe the process I used to implement logging for my favorite IRC channels. The Environment Pierc is my choice of logging bot for this article. It logs the contents of IRC channels to a MySQL instance, and presents an easy to use web interface.

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. Here is the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on IRC: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing. Connecting to an IRC server isn’t hard. You just need the right IRC client, and a little bit of information.