History of B2IRC

The founding

The first breath of life for B2IRC started on an IRCNet channel #animefin during December 26^th through December 28^th, 2000. A majority of channel users seemed to feel that the current state of that network was too unsafe and an alternate was needed. Due to many founding members having long term experiences as QuakeNet administrators and operators, we chose to run ircu2.10.10 as our server software. The first public server opened on December 30^th 2000 by Kyuu Eturautti and Tero "Sivis" Nybacka.

The first decade

At the time of our founding, there was a strong growth in the anime/manga hobbyists' target audience and most of our first users came from that area. As we planned out network further, we defined these users as our main target audience, while keeping the network open for any general public use. During the first year we wrote down clear network rules and designed our websites.

In March 2001 our development team with Sivis as the lead coder introduced the first version of the IRCU patch "Lain", which was based on earlier works of Darren Coleman for the QuakeNet ircu patch and EQU for the EQUNet ircu patch. Lain was our IRC daemon of choice for some 16 years, and during its first years, also one of the most popular IRC daemons globally based on user amounts mostly due to its use on the QuakeNet network. Around this time we also had a short lived channel bervice project called Ki, which was scrapped soon after.

Within several years, we decided to remove the notes of our first primary target audience, as it was clear our user base was much wider than this. A part of this was due to our web access option, which had been available almost since the start.

2010 and beyond

Around 2010 we experimented with a new IRCU patch but this didn't really provide satisfactory results. Thus the Lain patch was still continued.

On February 26^th 2011 the ounder and main operator of the IRC network EQUNet, EQU, decided to shut down the EQUNet IRC network. We were saddened to see EQUNet go, but to help in the transition we've agreed to redirect all EQUNet traffic to B2IRC servers.

Despite Slack and others, IRC had refused to die. Thus around 2017 during the 20th Birthday of our background organization B2, we made plans for the future. We decided on moving to a generic and modern IRCD, ngIRCd as well as an updated web access based on Kiwi IRC. Tests were done late in the year - but as it often goes, the project hit a few snags and was delayed until 2020, when we suddenly had a lot more time on our hands, due to global matters. Finally we were ready for another milestone in our lengthy history. Most of the original staff is still on board.