What's up with Efnet, Undernet etc

I have not used efnet or undernet since the beggining of 2000. So it’s been about 3 years. When I was last on them conversations were whizzing by so fast you couldn’t keep up with them.

Now for the last 3 nites I logged on and I could only find one channel on undernet and two on efnet where anyone was chatting. When I do a /who I get maybe 50 people in the room.

At first I thought. OK it’s a time delay in the server. I found 6 efnet and 4 undernet servers. And the results are all the same.

Are people just whispering to each other now? Or is it the server. I go to channel after channel with no conversation and I say hello no one answers.

Did the rules change in 3 years? If the /who command shows me people are they in multiple rooms you think? I even went under a lot of different nicknames so under the theory everyone hates me I could see.

You could try #straightdope on Undernet. It’s usually quite active.

I think instant messaging has replaced a lot of IRC activity.

Undernet used to be the hoppin’ lil joint, now it seems it’s Dalnet, which used to suck.

Most of the big IRC servers had problems in the last couple years - last time I was on Undernet or Efnet, they were both plagued by connectivity problems, hackers, viruses, netsplits, random downtime…

Most of the channels I went to on them moved about that time, for just that reason - I would be surprised if we were alone in that.

Hmmm…glances up

<nethack>
eats the tengu
feels very jumpy
</nethack>

Sorry. Force of habit.

You’re probably going to the wrong channels.

One of the EFnet channels I frequent has 100+ people in it right now. There are 44,000 channels formed with only 110,000 users, so you can imagine that most channels are nearly empty. A lot of the big channels are ‘secret’, so you can’t find them in the channel list.

EFnet is still a large and growing IRC network. Of course, as time goes on, people move from channel to channel, some people quit IRC, new people join and gravitate to different channels. In short, I think it’s just the channels you were in. EFnet currently (as I type this) has 111,000 users, and generally hovers around 120,000. During league play, Quakenet is larger with around 150,000 users, during the off-season it drops below 100,000 and EFnet again becomes the largest IRC network.

Dalnet used to be the largest IRC network, but they banned filesharing and cooperated with the FBI to bust those using the network to serve illegal files, resulting in reprisals from annoyed software pirates. This ended with Dalnet’s near destruction; it now hovers at about one quarter of its former users and continues to decline.

I know there are a lot of people I go into CHICAGO on efnet and I do a /who and get 75 names but there is NO Chatting.

I guess my questions is, why are they not chatting. OR are they whispering OR is the server just delayed so it may take 10 minutes for conversations to show up.

I can ping people so I really think the servers are OK, but the reason I stopped IRC way back was the netsplits made it horrible.

I was wondering if it is MORE a techinical issue than anything.

Thanks for Dalnet I forgot about them. Thanks for the SD Channel I will check it out.

It’s definitely not delay, most likely people just have other things to do and aren’t on IRC at the moment. Try back at other times, or on the weekend. Different channels have different times when they’re most active.