"It's Good to Talk"
Since about 1999 I have been using IRC to chat to all kinds of people, all over the world. In that time I have visited several different IRC networks, but have always also been on EFnet, through which I have made a number of friends and contacts.
IRC works by using an IRC client to connect to an IRC server, which is usually ran by someone else and in turn provides the connection to a network such as EFnet that one can then chat on. However, a couple of years ago I was feeling a little bored and decided it might be interesting to have a go at creating my own IRC server to learn more about it.
The EMind Network - Beginnings
ircd-ratbox is a very popluar IRC server daemon and is used by the majority of EFnet servers, so it was decided that ratbox would make a perfectly good learning platform. With that, I downloaded and compiled the source and soon after irc.elasticmind.net was born.
Having done that, it kinda got a little boring, but a friend had heard about what I was doing and decided they would like to participate. Now knowing how to create an IRC server, within a fairly short time a second server called irc.quadratic.org.uk was up and running and could then be linked to irc.elasticmind.net - forming a network of servers called EMind for the first time on the 7th of June, 2006.
A short time later a couple of friends started joining the network, emind.services.int was added, and a third IRC server called irc.easymac.org was created. More people started hanging on the network making it a neat little place to chat about stuff away from EFnet. Unfortunately a few months later a change in circumstances meant irc.quadratic.org.uk could no longer stay running and had to depart the network leaving just the two servers and network services.
The EMind Network - Changes
Sometime after EMind had been running for about a year and a half, we were approached by a member of Void Networks, another IRC network called VoidNet for short. During conversations the idea of merger came up, whereby the two networks would combine to form a larger one. This required a lot of discussion and planning but on the 17th of December, 2007 at about 01:22:51 UTC, the merger eventually took place.
At the time of writing, VoidNet holds about 245 to 380 users on 10 client servers, with openservices providing chanfix channel fixing - all connected through two primary hubs.
The EMind Network - Future
As time goes by, the people involved in creating the EMind network are putting more time into the joint EMind and VoidNet IRC networks - working towards hopefully making it into a nice place to chill out and learn new stuff.
Gradually all things change though, not so long ago the EMind servers modified their network tags to say VoidNet so that users connecting to the network are not confused. Maybe the characteristics identifying EMind will slowly fade, maybe they wont, and even if they do, hopefully it wont be forgotten.
Impossible to predict, the future is; so we'll just have show the current server usage for irc.elasticmind.net instead :)
Graph showing user count for the past week on irc.elasticmind.net
— posted by Moggie
