I spent the past few days reading about RPGs, and then all of today trying to decide whether I’d pick up world of warcraft again.
No, I decided, but it was a narrow escape. The price of a subscription checked my bloodlust, or I would’ve succumb to orcish wanderings for the weeks to come. These deliberations must’ve unlodged something in my head though, I’ve been thinking about IRC.
Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I spent hours each night idling on IRC. I learned a lot of things, and overall, it was probably not the worst education I could have had. I could have read more maybe, wrote more, done math more, but chances are, I probably would’ve just watched TV more. I don’t harbor ambitions to be a programmer anymore, so that side of learning is useless to me now. But the things that I learned about community, well, those are things that I won’t forget, probably can’t forget.
I should say something about the structure of IRC, to encircle this landscape that I will soon describe.[ IRC is a sort of persistant chat. There are IRC servers and on the IRC servers there are IRC channels. A channel may be registered and then it belongs to the person who registered the channel. That person then becomes an "Op". An "Op" has the privilege to kick, ban, silence, op, deop, a long with an assortment of other less commonly used privileges. An op is sort of a bureacuract for chat harmony.
The people who ran the server are server admins. Their chief disciplinary power was the "k-line". Once a user was k-lined, they could no longer return to the server.
I should note, the method of banning and k-lining relies on server masks -- a regular expression for a DNS. A whole city could be k-lined, or a whole ISP, or a whole ip range, or just a username.
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(to be continued tomorrow)
