How do people keep their nicks listed as currently online, when they in fact they're not online? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- alphanovember · 2014-01-07 11:54 Sorry if this is a dumb question... Popular channels always have a huge list of nicks, but it seems like some nicks aren't actually online in the sense that a real person is monitoring them, because they never respond. I'm talking about nicks that are (seemingly) listed as being online 24 hours a day, every day. They aren't bots, just regular accounts that I occasionally see active. How do they do this? Do they just run a client on an always-on host for some reason? Or is there some other way that they do this? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Helzibah · 2014-01-07 15:53 Idling! Idling is a staple of IRC, many many people leave their computers connected to IRC even when they're not there, or are actively doing something else (e.g. gaming). It's common courtesy to have your client record highlights though so you can always respond to things later. There are basically two common ways of doing this, either running your IRC client on an always-on host as you say, or using an IRC bouncer. The first method works well if your home computer is always-on, or if you're running a terminal client (e.g. `irssi`, `weechat`) and can thus throw it on a server under `screen` or `tmux`. If you want to use a graphical client and don't want your home machine perpetually online, then you need a bouncer. I use ZNC, but there are a few out there and they all work in roughly the same way. Basically, a bouncer sits on a server somewhere and connects to IRC for you. You then connect your local client to the bouncer rather than directly to IRC, and it will relay messages for you. This has a couple of benefits: * you can get the bouncer to relay, say, the last 50 lines of chat before you joined your client in, thus making sure you know what's going on if you turn your computer on in the middle of a conversation * you can get the bouncer to store all highlights and relay them to you when you connect your client, catching up on anything you missed * you can connect multiple clients so your phone and your desktop can all be in-sync ---------------------------------------------------------------------- alphanovember · 2014-01-07 16:15 Thank you, this is what I was looking for! I'd very briefly read about bouncers a while back but couldn't for the life of me remember that's what they were actually called. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2014-01-07 16:25 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- hello_josh · 2014-01-07 18:29 I was able to setup ZNC on my home server and I'm an IRC noob. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3ricG · 2014-01-07 19:18 I do this by leaving a screen session running on a server of mine. Although I'm not there, I have notifications sent to my phone, and I have ssh clients (and standalone IRC clients) on my phone so I can connect and respond if I need to. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Katana__ · 2014-01-07 21:39 as a note it's possible to do both. i have both a bouncer on my server and weechat running locally, then have a way to connect to it remotely so I can get scrollback from znc on my mobile device (or I can just ssh in and tmux attach to get to weechat) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Helzibah · 2014-01-08 09:43 Oh, of course! I do something similar, I have `irssi` running in `tmux` on a server, connecting to ZNC somewhere else. I prefer this scheme because it lets me keep my `irssi` setup the same regardless of where I access it from, but still allows the flexibility of being able to join in my phone if I ever want to. Great minds!