IRCloggy History

The beginning

The blog post How it all started explains how and why I started logging IRC channels.

The initial port

The first version of the IRC logger 2 was a python port by François Beerten of the irclogger made by Colas Nahaboo. Colas started with the bot made by Sean B. Palmer. That bot uses the ircAsync module by Dan Connolly.

Due to different design goals, some features appeared and others disappeared during the port. A bit of care was taken to make the bot more useable on the wild and dangerous Internet. So, for example, it's not possible for everybody to disable the logging bot on a channel.

Primary design goals of IRC logger 2:

• Usable on Internet
• Reliable
• Quiet

Standard common features:

• Browsable logs
• Searchable logs

New features compared to the original bot :

• aggressive hiding of email addresses
• slightly better security
• bot runs as a deamon. Init-style control of the deamon (start, stop and restart).
• search in a timespan
• and many more

Features in the original bot which have been removed :

• Full control via irc of the bot (activation and deactivation of the bot by anybody)
• Password protection of a channel log (anybody could lock everybody else out)
• regular expressions in searches, agrep
• no idle comments in the middle of the logs
• twiki format (could come back)

The rewrite

The logging bot has been completely rewritten. It can now connect to multiple channels on different IRC servers.

The web frontend has also been totally rewritten. Since then, no code from the initial port is being used anymore.

Some of the new imrpovements include :

• Improved page layout
• Colored nicks with stable colors (a given nick will always have the same color)
• Prettier list of logged channels with their last topic
• Properly format IRC color codes