ahnberg

I have a dedicated message window on part of my screen where all private messages aswell as notifications matching my defined hilights end up.

Other than that irssi has a pretty good activity tracker; and combined with a script to allow me to filter out things/channels that I don't want to trigger activity (joins, parts for example, and certain channels I just don't care as much about). On top of this I just have a hotkey bound to "/window goto active" that basically takes you to the windows with the highest activity and the lowest identifier. These ones combined does most of the trick.

But its obvious I can't read and keep active track of 120 channels, often I just briefly glance through things, if someone has lots of activity and/or mentions of me I appear and can keep track. Except that its just manual choice of what channel I want to use at the moment. :)

Not a perfect system, but works for me.

I'm maybe an exception since I am and have "always" been heavily involved in IRC, but IRC is still a central part of my life. My irssi session is connected to around 120 channels on 16-or-so networks right now.

I've met my fianceé on IRC, got friends for life from all over the world through IRC, got jobs and assignments through IRC and I almost daily solve complex problems with the help of my community and network of friends and contacts through IRC! I've yet to find a tool that comes even remotely close to being as useful for me as IRC.

On QuakeNet we're regularly inviting companies to have developer chats, beta-key giveaways, and we have partnership with events like Dreamhack, for example.

On DALnet we've modernized our webchat (go to http://www.dal.net and give it a shot if you don't have an IRC client installed) using qwebirc (originally written for QuakeNet; but a lot of networks have chosen to use it) and also cooperated with mibbit.com and kiwiirc.com for allowing access.

At work I also run a smaller network with around 50 colleagues more or less actively chatting and using it on a daily basis. Digital office landscape working very well for people both at the office, at home or spread out over other cities.

A lot of applications, websites and services would benefit a lot by not having to reinvent the logic of messaging again by simply writing a frontend to an IRC server and have so so so much for free. Either on their own with an IRC server, or by setting it up towards one of our existing networks. If someone is interested to discuss such ideas, please just ask here or privately!

TL;DR: IRC still kicks ass! :)

Unfortunatelly suffering from the same problems, as soon as I type : or ( or = or anything other than normal characters, I get errors. :( Cool typing experience other than that!

I am happy to see IRC here. Way underused communication method! Certainly are things that can be improved with the protocol and services, but few people understand how useful it can be for business aswell as personal chat-needs.