Beta 2 has arrived!

It's been years since I started this new rewrite of IRC Driven, initially started in 2014. I release beta 1 about 2 years ago and again was unable to work on the site. It pleases me to bring to you guys Beta 2 of IRC Driven 3.0.

Bots

The bots have been entirely rewritten in Python with the Twisted Library. All major bots are fully functional, including the indexer.
This includes these bots:

  • Indexer Bot
  • Presignup Bot
  • Admin checking bot
  • Admin Debug Bot (you will never see this).

Functionality of the Indexer Bot

What Works
  • Index Users
  • Index Servers
  • Index Capabilities
  • Index Version
  • Index Uptime (if supported)
  • Index Admin Info
  • Index Local User Count
  • Ability to remotely index all servers in database in one connection (if supported)
  • Ability to delay /list up to 180 seconds (no need to create an exemption)
  • Possibly more but unable to remember.
Coming Soon
  • Ability to pull /LINKS (if supported) and index all servers on list remotely (again if supported)
  • Internally the bots API calls aren't asynchronous which will cause a bit of a delay in indexing larger networks, I plan on adding asynchronous calls using Treq soon.

Website

These are the new features and fixes to the main website:

Network Submission

For the most part, network submissions work very well. When you sign up a bot will check your network that it meets our requirements, if it does it will send you an email with a link to verify your email with. If it doesn't it will send you an email telling you why it didn't pass. You can specify the list delay value straight in the submission and it will carry over to the full registration.

Network Pages

Network Pages have added all functionality to every section.

What works
  • User charts for past week (still buggy though)
  • Ability to add/edit long description to main page
  • Ability to add/update/delete news articles and request they appear on home page
  • Ability to view server list and single server details (with ability to modify specific server settings such as location per server)
  • Ability to add/delete history entries into a timeline.
  • Live Chat using internal IRC Driven IRC Web Gateway powered by KiwiIRC. (this has been having issues which will be resolved soon).
  • Ability to change network extended options
  • Ability to view log for network
  • Ability to gain initial access to network via adminbot.
Coming soon
  • Ability to add other admins once verified as superadmin
  • Ability to add servers manually to be indexed (must support remote commands).
  • Much more I am sure.

Channel Pages

A lot of functionality has been added to channel pages and for the most part mirror the network page design.

What works
  • Creating a description for channel in Markdown
  • Adding a channel logo
  • Live chat powered by KiwiIRC, same issues as mentioned above though.
Coming soon
  • Ability to log directly to website using an (opt-in, of couse) bot connected to the channel.
  • Timeline same as network pages for history
  • A way to verify channel admins without staff intervention
  • An ability for users to mark themselves as a user of the channel.

Forum and Wiki

The Forum (machina) and Wiki (django-wiki) have been updated and the design has been fixed in a lot of ways.

The Future

The idea of IRC Driven is to create a somewhat social media site to help guide users back to IRC, here is a small glimpse of my plans in the future.

  • User Profiles and the ability to friend/link channels/networks to your accounts.
  • An IRC roulette that will use the live chat to randomly connect you to networks (smaller ones, not the big ones) to give the chance for people to meet new people with new topics (an opt-out for channels and networks will be created).
  • IRC Statistics, we plan on creating a bot to anonymously scan IRC ports across the IPv4 range in order to give some cool stats.
  • A quote database ala Bash.org style.
  • The ability for network owners to point their domain names to us and have your network page be your home page.

I have a lot more ideas, which I will keep updating the community on.

Ways to Help

I am the sole developer of IRC Driven, I have written the entire thing from scratch and it takes a lot of work, and I am not always the best at Python. I am always seeking people who wish to help contribute.

Our stack consists of:
Django 3.2 using Python 3.8. The design is written in Bootstrap 4 (Material Design Bootstrap).
The bots are written using Python 3.8 with the latest Twisted Library.

You can also assist with getting conversations started on the forums, or contributing to the Wiki pages, or even just getting networks aware of our return.

Shout Outs

I seriously appreciate everything everyone has done to assist me, and I will give credit to the following people for everything they've done for me, such as abusing their networks to test the bots, providing me feedback, helping me with coding problems and just general support.

  • ComputerTech - He has been a huge motivation and push to get me to start the project again and his interest in the project has given me some inspiration in the process. He has also brought a few networks to the site.
  • Jobe - Jobe has been with IRC Driven since nearly the beginning and has always let me abuse his networks to test the bots and help me with coding problems.
  • Foxy - Another user who has been a motivation to work on the site, she also may help with the wiki which would be great. I've already assigned the Wiki Admin group in Django, she may not know this yet though (hehe).

Also, as more of an oberserver, newton (aka Sindacious back in the day) has been more participating in the talk of IRC Driven, and had to give him a shout out because he was an OG Co-Founder back in the day.

Thanks anyone else who has been involved, helped me, or given me motivation.

Final Thoughts

Keep helping me stay motivated! I will end this rant, I hope everyone enjoys my hard work!