Some of you old-school regs may remember a time when we used to have a web-based IRC applet on the site here. First it was JavaIRC, but the downside to that was it ran off the clients machine, so if the commonly used IRC ports were blocked (i.e. from your place of work) you couldn’t use it. Then we tried out a script called CGI:IRC, which was not affected by any type of firewall restrictions and worked great… until my webhost found out I was using it and had me remove it, as it uses the web-server itself to make the connection to IRC, not the client. And I couldn’t move the script over to ‘Bubba’ because the script can only run in a unix/linux environment.

I decided it was time to bring it back though, as a few of you have expressed interest in having it available (I was missing it, too). Look to the left frame of the site here, you’ll see the link for the IRC script. All ya gotta do is type in a username, hit login, and you’re good to go. The script logs you into #hardfought on irc.hardfought.org, and a newly installed linkbot (HF-Bot) will relay chat between #hardfought on both our IRC network and gamesurge.net so everyone concerned can see each other’s communication. The reason why I’m having this script connect to our network and not directly to gamesurge.net is because on our network, I can control what is and what isn’t a trusted network – if gamesurge.net sees too many connections from the same source (read: this script) it will g-line the server it resides on (this has happened before, hah). We wont have that problem on our network. Once logged in, you can perform pretty much all of the commands you’re used to using when on your favorite IRC client – you can join different channels, initiate private chatrooms with other users, and so on.

Concerning HF-Bot – it’s a pretty powerful tool, and once I learn more about it, you may start to see some of it’s functionality put into play (file transfers, channel protection, etc). If for whatever reason you don’t want to see its output as it’s linking both networks together, just /ignore HF-Bot… why you’d wanna do that is beyond me, but I know someone is gonna bitch about it so there’s your solution ;-)

Enjoy, folks.