Welcome to the IRC Compendium! My name’s Daniel and I’m writing this up to pass along my knowledge to regular users, network admins, as well as software developers.

IRC has an almost unparalleled history of both experimentation and staying power. Lots of different ideas have been tested with it, many systems have been backed by IRC, and it’s even used today as the chat system behind some pretty popular websites and games.

However, it’s a bit difficult to get started with, running a network’s no small task, and developing for it is a bit of a minefield. This guide’s intended to help with all those issues, and make sure IRC’s a decent chat system that’s usable today!

Up above, you’ll see the next and previous page buttons, as well as the Table of Contents if you expand it. This should make it easy to go through the compendium in whatever sort of order you want.

If you have any suggestions, questions or comments, please let me know with an issue on our GitHub repo. Or you can talk to us in the #ircdocs channel on Freenode. Always happy to get help, especially on a project of this size.

Regards,
Daniel Oakley