Would an Ultima IRC channel be of use to you?
It has been suggested that an IRC channel, similar to the Wing Commander CIC’s #Wingnut chat, be set up at Aiera. It’s not really a bad idea…with the addition of the Codex to the Aiera domain, it’s fair to say that this place has become (or, perhaps more correctly, is becoming) something of a hub of activity for the Ultima fandom, not unlike the CIC is for…well…Wingnuts.
Another words: I’d be all for doing this.
Of course, there’s a few drawbacks to the idea, not the least of which is that my current hosting package won’t support the addition of an IRC service; I’d have to upgrade to a more expensive hosting package. I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to that, since doing so would confer several other advantages (performance and uptime improvements being among these), but the additional cost would be a bit much for me. (“I might need some help footing the bill,” is what I am saying.)
As such, the first step I need to take is asking all you Dragons and Dragonettes whether such a thing as this would be of use to you. If you need more information about what IRC is, I can suggest nothing better than clicking on the link to #Wingnut, above; you can read a bit about the value the service brings to that community, and even access it directly via a browser-based Java applet. Then, once you’ve done that — if you’ve done that — come back here and get your vote on:
[poll id=”1″]
This poll will remain active until some time on the 14th of November, after which I’ll start making decisions about whether to migrate Aiera et. al. over to a more robust hosting package.
I spend a decent amount of time in stratics.frws.com’s ultima online and the undernet Ultima Dragons internet chapter channel’s.
Id be game.
I’d say a steamgroup or web based chatroom at this point would be more useful.
I’m with Windforce. Why spend the extra moola? You do enough and then some already.
I had one on Austnet until about a month ago, registered since 1999. Let it de-register due to lack of use.
I would hang there, but I’d use an existing network. No use paying for a whole server if you only want one channel. Maybe ask for a channel where #wingnut is…
Also I think irc is a dying breed of chat (much like usenet is a dying form of forum), most people don’t know what it is, mostly people on the more developer side of things are actually useing it.
I have very fond memories of taking “trips” away from #Wing-Commander on the DALnet to the Undernet to visit the Ultima fans there, back in the day. I’d certainly idle, at least, in an Ultima Aiera chat.
A collection of every screenshot and material/info of the original isometric Ultima 9 would be much more neccessary imho 🙂
Definitely,
I’d love to have a general Ultima related community IRC. On ANY network, but yes – creating a network solely for it would be pretty useless, especially with the number of networks out there.
IRC isn’t exactly uncommon, and its quite easy to find a network that’ll suit your needs.
irc.chatspike.net
irc.stratics.com
Both are quite good.
I just set up an IRC server at Eight Virtues to communicate with FEARYOURSELF. It works locally and port forwarding has been configured. If anyone wants to test it, it’s open season for WtF/Aiera and crew to use as they please. It will be a permanent feature.
You may access it via the usual ports (6666/7) at eightvirtues.com. I don’t know how to define pre-existing channels yet, so feel free to create a channel by joining it (/join #somechannel).
I have plenty of bandwidth, so feel free to abuse the service as required. Also, please let me know if it doesn’t work so I can fix it, or if you have any suggestions as to how it can be improved.
My current server uptime, including power and ISP outages, late-night system maintenance, hardware replacement, etc., is 98.333%. That’s over a year of monitoring port 80 at 5 second intervals. While that isn’t an awesome record by some standards, all things considered it’s actually pretty good.
I also recently upgraded the server to a software RAID 5 using six one-TB drives, so it should be able to suffer a drive loss and replacement without even being rebooted.
This is what I call a MOTD:
http://www.eightvirtues.com/misc/irc.png
I generated the ASCII image by downloading a plain image of the Codex, circle-cropping it and inverting the colors so the drawing was white and the background was black. Then I installed jp2a and ran the command:
jp2a –width=78 –chars= oO8 codex.jpg
Escaping the space with the backslash was a difference maker for the character palette. Makes me wish I still ran a BBS. I’d add a splash of color with some ANSI codes. Too bad IRC, at least the normal version, doesn’t support it. (Or does it?)
The site renderer concatenates consecutive hypens, so “–” is really “- -” without the space or quotes. Thus the jp2a command above shouldn’t be copied/pasted without modification.
hmm, about that decision… I guess it was made without big announcement 🙂
Actually, I rather forgot about it, to be honest.
Of course, there was a bit of a reason for that (check the date on the penultimate comment).
I need to get back on this, and I’m thinking I might just take Kevin up on his offer. Upgrading my hosting would be nice, but it’s just untenable right now.
Unless something has gone awry on my server, it’s still up and running.
Cool…well, let’s set up a dedicated channel. That doable?
If it’s alright by you, I might also investigate whether there are any web-based frontends for IRC, a page I could redirect interested parties to in order for them to chat sans a desktop client.
Not that I know for sure such a thing exists…but it’d be cool if it did. I could even embed it behind password protection here on the site, in order to keep bots away.
Yay 😉
There are web frontends for irc (but no idea how to set up such one), there is also a mozilla chat or so, a plugin for firefox.
And yes I remember the second dragonlet 😉
(btw in 4 weeks my second one will arrive ;))
Oooh…exciting times!
It’s quite the transition, going from one to two. Though I suppose I should ask about how old the first one is?
We’ve done “birth announcements” on the site before, so if you’d like to tell us all about the wee one’s arrival, I’d be more than happy to post it for you.
It’s a bit more complicated 😉
When I got together with my ex-gf she already had a four year old daughter (who is now 13 years old) and we have a daughter together who is now 5 years old. We seperated 2 1/2 years ago and I see my daughter once a week over night (which is tonight but, well she has a fever now and sleeps…)… So you see, complicated patch work family 😉
And, no thanks on the site announcement 😉
Totally understand, Dom.
WTF DRAGON: “Cool…well, let’s set up a dedicated channel. That doable?”
I suck at IRC, so while it probably is doable I don’t know how to do it. I did some minimal research but am still stumped. If there are any IRC gurus out there maybe they could show me the light.
Right now I just use the command “/join #aiera”, or whatever channel I want to create, and I’m in there. Would be interesting to see if any random person logging in could do the same. They probably can.
If you always want the channel open, you need a BNC/Bouncer, otherwise just register the channel. For that you need either a external service, a shell account, or a spare computer.
I still vote for irc.chatspike.net, but wherever is fine.
At least some nick registering infrastructure should be there (nickserv). So people can register their nick (and enforce their nicks thus no one else canuse it), otherwise it’s first come first serve and you cannot know for sure who is behind a nick…
And a trustworthy existing chat service would be useful as well. For example freenode who serves most opensource projects has been running for years, know their stuff and will most likely run for some years to come. Got several servers and has been up whenever I logged in the last decade.
Nooffense to Kevin, but I’d rather use something like that where I feel like it’s going to be around for another decade.
I only know about freenode, chatspike might be in that league as well.
I can just as easily set up with Freenode; they’re commonly known and solid.
I’m just looking at web-based/Wordpress plugin options right now. I think I might have found a candidate, so I’ll try and jump on that some time next week.
Whatever works for the majority here works for me too. Hopefully I’ll be around for another decade, but you never know, haha. I can guarantee you however that my server will outlive me. I run my business and LAN from it, so downtime is something that makes my hair stand on end.
At the end of it, it’s all about configuration. There’s some valid issues that have been raised, such as nickname registration, that I would like to see addressed. If you can do that, it would actually be my preference to be able to point people to an IRC channel hosted on a server that has some Ultima imagery to its name. If you don’t feel comfortable setting that stuff up — and/or if we can’t arrange for one of these other fine gents to assist in that setup — then I can go with Freenode.
What say you all?
did this end up happening?