IRC Bouncer Setup

ircbouncersetup.md

HELLO

There is only one proper irc setup. Many people will tell you to use a bouncer. These people area silly and wrongheaded folk whose brains are filled with stupid ideas about irc. Let me explain.

What, exactly, is a bouncer? I will tell you! An irc bouncer is an irc client that is written in an irc server. Should you choose to use a bouncer, you will need an irc client to connect to your irc client.

Why in the world would anyone use a bouncer? Well, people like to be able to turn off their computers and stay connected to irc. People like to have logs of all of the conversations that went on in their absence. Bouncers do solve this problem, but they are clearly not the best solution. In my experience, the following users have valid reasons to use irc bouncers:

1. User has trouble with computers and requires special considerations when connecting to irc (like a gui client or a life coach).

2. User has never heard of screen or tmux. Poor souls :(

3. User is bored with life and enjoys unnecessarily complicating things with servers talking to servers and clients talking to clients. This would be even better if they threw in some sort of enterprise message bus, some nosql, and some sort of log oriented solution like a kafka or something. There's plenty of room for optimization here.

Here's what you should do on your internet-connected-box-running-an-ssh-server-and-a-derivative-of-the-one-true-linux-distro-debian instead:

# as root (or with sudo)
apt-get install -y tmux weechat weechat-plugins

# as your user
tmux
weechat

THEN! When you connect in the future, you can use the following:

# as your user
tmux attach

This truly amazing strategy will allow you to experience all of the the good parts of irc bouncers with none of the silliness.

Now you have a proper irc setup.

Configure your weechat to do your desired autojoin and autoconnects and so on. Life is good.

I don't have time for your shenanigans.