Tuesday, September 9, 2008

IRC Logging Made Easy

Internet Relay Chat, IRC has become a very popular means of communication not only among people of common interest, but also people who belong to a certain group or community. Open Source Development Teams are one such good example. I, along with my pals working on SCI-Flex, Final Year project at University of Moratuwa, decided to have our own channel as well.

Creating a IRC channel is not a big deal, but maintaining chat logs has become one big requirement for Open Source Projects such as SCI-Flex. We decided to have our very own chat logger as well (still experimental). Googling for chat loggers, I found that it is not a very big deal to write a simple chat logger software.

Based on this post, by Philipp Lenssen, I created my very own variant chat logger application that works on php. Perl scripts have also been a popular choice, but for my requirement I chose php. Therefore, inorder to get going with this script you simply need to install php and that's all. The bot was also registered on the freenode IRC network and thus needs to authenticate itself in.

This application is capable of:
  1. Joining to your IRC channel
  2. Authenticating itself
  3. Logging messages on channel during presence
  4. Periodically publishing the log (I use a daily publish cycle)
  5. Hide IP addresses of all users on log
and several other features. You are free to donwload this from here.

2 comments:

jim said...

Hi,
Very interesting post i see you wrote it in 2008 nearly 3 years ago and you can see IRC is still very big new i have a question i am moving to Thailand in 2 months time do you think i will find a good IRC networks does EFNet run over there ?
Thanks James

Dave Carr said...

Thank you for this. I always prefer php scripts because my perl leaves a lot to be desired.