Outdated Information
The network has been renamed to Liao.Please see this blog post for more info: Announcement: Renaming TermerNet IRC to Liao
Where's it lacking?
Modern chat services like Discord have tons of quality of life features that make using it very convenient. Chat history is a staple of modern chat systems in general, and in my opinion, the place where IRC lacks the most. IRC technically has a chat history specification in IRCv3, but it is very sparsely adopted, and at the time of writing, the only major client that supports it is KiwiIRC, a web client. The current way offline chat history is received is by using what's called a "bouncer", which is basically a proxy that you connect to that stays online all the time so that it can collect chat history to relay back to clients when they connect. This is a very inconvenient and cumbersome way of handling history, and is not suitable for modern use. Most people do not have the skills nor means to set up a ZNC bouncer just for chatting. Modern services should already handle chat history.What am I doing to help?
I'm writing this to announce the creation of a new network named TermerNet (I would've named it something else but I would have needed to buy a domain for that). The aim of the network is to provide the functionality that is provided by bouncers like ZNC by default within the network itself, so that no setup is required to take advantage of modern features. Every channel has message history by default, and upon registering, clients will be "always-on", meaning they will appear as if they are online just like a bouncer, and can received private messages that will be shown when the user returns.My goal is to make IRC more accessible and useful to communities, and I hope you will join me in bringing IRC to the 21st century!