You know the joke, right? In the far future, somebody, somewhere, still wants to use IRC.
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
