Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”
Well let me tell you my friend. It stands for Internet Relay Chat and it’s been around for 34 years. It’s pretty much perfected at this point and quite easy to use if you have even the slightest technical knowledge.
So IRC servers are separate from one another with each server having it’s own admins. Each server you connect to has it’s own bots ran by individuals to messages and ask for things.
IRC servers work by sending slash commands much like discord does. To message another user you might type /msg coolboot2000 hello world! Piracy on IRC works by sending a bot a pm with the pack number you want.
“Where do I find servers and bots and pack numbers?” It’s as easy as using a xdcc search engine. http://sunxdcc.com/ has both a search and a list of networks. (DCC is Direct Client to Client meaning no files pass thru the server and XDCC is a version of DCC that allows large files to be transferred.)
“How do I connect?” You use an IRC client with SSL support. ~mIRC~ AdiIRC for windows and Hexchat with a patch for Linux. Once installed you can use the slash command /connect or use the clients GUI buttons to make a connection to the server.
“How do I make my own IRC client?” Follow the specifications here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_commands There are a ton of pre-made IRC libraries for pretty much every programming language.
Best luck friends!
edit: updated 11-6-23
Where are the files ultimately hosted and who is paying for the bandwidth?
How do the servers avoid being taken down?
by the bots.
connections are Direct Client to Client. the server never sees any data. Same way google gets around linking to pirate sites. They don’t host any files themselves.
That’s not true. IRC is a client-server system. Your messages go to a server and are “relayed” to clients.
It’s not a p2p messaging system
DCC and XDCC are p2p. the /msg is relayed.
DCC = direct client-to-client. With IRC the server is not hosting or distributing any files it is making connections between clients similar to edonkey or soulseek just with a different protocol. Which means you connect directly with your IP to the client that has the files you want and the bandwidth is dependent on how fast each of the clients’ internet is.