<story><title>IRC turns thirty</title><url>http://www.oulu.fi/university/node/54247</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sbjs</author><text>I tried it before and it&amp;#x27;s not as easy as it sounds. There is no one spec, it&amp;#x27;s a handful of RFCs and other ad hoc extensions that are barely documented anywhere. I think there&amp;#x27;s at least a dozen different documents you have to refer to.</text></item><item><author>donatj</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;ve never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet.&lt;p&gt;You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It&amp;#x27;s all human readable and understandable. It&amp;#x27;s incredible. It&amp;#x27;s what an open protocol should be.&lt;p&gt;Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sshine</author><text>For most of the client protocol, it&amp;#x27;s just RFC 1459 and RFC 2812. Then there&amp;#x27;s CTCP, DCC, server-to-server protocols and the 005 numeric.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure you need any of these for communicating via telnet or writing a small bot that will answer back.</text></comment>
<story><title>IRC turns thirty</title><url>http://www.oulu.fi/university/node/54247</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sbjs</author><text>I tried it before and it&amp;#x27;s not as easy as it sounds. There is no one spec, it&amp;#x27;s a handful of RFCs and other ad hoc extensions that are barely documented anywhere. I think there&amp;#x27;s at least a dozen different documents you have to refer to.</text></item><item><author>donatj</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;ve never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet.&lt;p&gt;You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It&amp;#x27;s all human readable and understandable. It&amp;#x27;s incredible. It&amp;#x27;s what an open protocol should be.&lt;p&gt;Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindslight</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve toyed with many protocols via reading RFCs, but in this case just run tcpdump on an existing client and you&amp;#x27;ll be set.</text></comment>