ZNC

What on earth is an IRC bouncer? What is ZNC? Just why?

• What on earth is an IRC bouncer?

It sounds like some overly muscled steroid overloaded aggressive meatsack that denies entry to a bar on spurious grounds. It's not.

An IRC bouncer is benign. It acts as your proxy to IRC servers of your choice, a concierge if you will. While you are away, the bouncer stays connected to all your IRC networks and channels as your representative then (optionally) tells you everything that went on while you were away.

Rather than your connection to an IRC server being client >> IRC server it becomes client >> Bouncer >> IRC server(s). The nice thing is Bouncer never sleeps so Bouncer >> IRC server(s) is always maintained, the client can come and go at will. When you reconnect to the Bouncer you can (electively) get scrollback for all the channels you were in prior to disconnection.

• What is ZNC?

ZNC is a popular IRC bouncer. See ZNC Along with PsyBNC psyBNC these two are the most commonly used IRC Bouncers. psyBNC seems unmaintained right now unfortunately.

• Just why?

Very good question. Asked by pretty much everyone that has never used an IRC bouncer.

- Channels you want a permanent presence in without keeping your own in home computers powered up.
- Unreliable connection causing disconnections.
- Less effort! Make technology work for you.

SN's ZNC Bouncer for Staff

SoylentNews runs its own bouncer on the same server that the IRC daemon runs on. This allows staff to remain in channels even when they are physically away so that they can avail themselves of scrollback on their return.

Staff are welcome to use the SN bouncer for other networks, but given you have to surrender your nickserv password to the bouncer to act on your behalf, something something on your own recognisance be it.

Assumptions at this point are that you have a SoylentNews IRC nick, have it registered.. so let's get on with the nuts and bolts...

THIS IS ARTICLE NEEDS A LOT OF WORK! :D