When m(IRC) and ANSI C were popular

It was 2005, I was amazed with internet chats, both as an user, and as a computer programming enthusiast. m(IRC), an Internet Relay Chat application was probably the most popular chat app. For some young people, at that time, being "online" was not merely about having an internet connection, it was about being online on "mIRC". Sometimes people actually scheduled to be "online" together. Having a continuous internet connection at home was still a luxury for many.

As many of the early internet services and related software, installing and managing an IRC network was a complex activity, as such, most IRC chat networks were managed by large university groups and internet service providers. This was where I got in, improving the server side software, making it easier and more flexible to use for every body.

IRC chat networks provided both chat rooms and private messaging. Users were identified by their chosen nickname, and the chat rooms «named IRC channels» had moderation features. IRC servers kept all is users and channels information only in memory. When servers were restarted all this information was lost To overcome this, many IRC networks implemented IRC "registration" services, these services worked as "robots" which assigned  control over nicknames and chat-rooms, keeping that data on a persistent database, there services were also frequently extended with extra features like offline messaging.

I believed that there was a great potential for more advanced IRC services, using web/mail integration features which I was not able to find in the existing software. That was when I decided to develop an IRC Services software from scratch. 

I didn't kept any record about the initial development time-line and I was not familiar with any open source version control system at the time. "PTlink IRC Services 3" was released around June 2005, containing around 20k lines of ANSI C code.

It featured a C library providing an event driven API for all the IRC server protocol handling. For example, for an "on connect" message service, you would only need to bind your C function to the NEW_USER event, and from your function, you would use the irc_SendNotice() to delivery a message.

Services were provided as a set of modules, these modules were implemented as shared object libraries that could be dynamic loaded/reloaded, this is something that you currently find on most software, modules/plugins support.

Last but not least, the data store back-end was MySQL, while most IRC services were still using file based custom formats. This also allowed the development of a minimal web interface.

In 2006 the development was halted, mostly because I lost ownership over the ptlink.net domain which was bound to the software, and due to the trending lose of popularity of IRC.

It is a bit sad when you spend some hundred hours of development, specially open source, and it gets into a dead end. Nevertheless developing an event driven C library, with a modular IRC services integrator was a very challenging and exciting personal experience.