Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as

Issues in the original design of IRC were the amount of shared state data being a limitation on its scalability, the absence of unique user identifications

There are numerous search engines available to aid the user in finding what they are looking for on IRC. Generally the search engine consists of two parts, a "back-end" (or "spider/crawler") and a front-end "search engine".
The back-end

Much like conventional P2P file sharing, users can create file servers that allow them to share files with each other by using customised IRC bots or scripts for their IRC client

IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the

Client software
Client software exists for various operating systems or software packages, as well as web-based or inside games. Many different clients are

IRC still lacks a single globally accepted standard convention for how to transmit characters outside the 7-bit ASCII repertoire. IRC servers