One of the problems that efnext is trying to address, and a cause of network instability is DOS attacks against servers by little kiddies that want to take over channels. Not that I'm for or against the new network, but it seems that building a consensus and peer review of the protocols would be a good thing. As for the fear that this will lead to central control and monitoring of the IRC network, my guess is that IRC is already heavily monitored. It's a hell of a lot more trivial than Usenet with only 33 servers on the network, and each communication tagged with the hostname or IP address that originated it. Alex B. Shepardsen said:
On Sun, 31 Dec 2000, dmolnar wrote:
Something I don't see much of on the efxnet page - "why?"
This is in the FAQ: "EFNext is the name of a project geared towards making IRC a more stable, uniform, chat environment."
and they say "introductory document coming soon." I still don't know why this is happening (I don't hang out on EFnet). What do the efxnet people give as their reasons for a new IRC network?
Well, as an EFnet user, I can say that EFnet is pretty unreliable. Network splits are extremely common (major splits occuring once every 3 or 4 hours, and usually lasting about 10 minutes or so). Lag between major irc servers is often quite apparent. All-in-all, EFnet needs a lot of work. Some of the other networks like Chatnet behave better, but they are also smaller and have less users.
Is there a need for a new IRC network? Unclear. I think that the probolems EFnet has are not going to be fixed by relacing it. The IRC servers simply need to be more reliable.
Alex
-- Kevin L. Prigge Internet Services U of MN, Twin Cities