The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I didn't even think that was still in use. Thought it had moved to google chat.

The chat room has been fairly sparse lately, but you can still often find me, Irwin, Mike Lamb, Spud, and various others hanging out in there.

Get an IRC client of your choice, sign on to us.chatjunkies.org, and join the channel #Songfight! (don't skimp on the exclamation point).

OR, you could just click on this handy link! http://jan-krueger.net/sf-irc

Hey, where did everyone go?

Up your butt

Also Facebook

But mostly the butt

Mystery solved. Chatjunkies had a netsplit that is taking unusually long to resolve itself.

SO. If you were in the chat room when it happened, then it automatically (and probably without informing you) routed you to at.chatjunkies.org. When you go to chat again, please disconnect and reconnect to us.chatjunkies.org. I have also noted this in the topic of the split-off channel.

Disregard. It's fixed. Also, us.chatjunkies.org apparently no longer exists.

jast wrote:Also, us.chatjunkies.org apparently no longer exists.

Weird.

did the chatroom die today, or am I just more disconnected
than usual? It's so lonely...

It looks like the net is split again.

That chat network seems to be going down. Their website is gone, too. Servers are not connected anymore. Etc.

On the assumption that nobody is going to complain (much), I am moving the channel to euIRC, a network that I know to be comparably stable.

I have already changed my instruction page; if you had the widget bookmarked, head back onto http://jan-krueger.net/sf-irc and re-bookmark the link. Sorry for the trouble, but at least I'm fairly sure we won't have to do this again.

The new server address is irc.euirc.net. The channel name is still #songfight!.
PS. I'm going by a different nickname there; don't be surprised. I'm sure you'll recognise me.

WTF? Just tried to get on today for the latest Nur Ein smack talk and got this error...
Is this unusual for IRC?

EDIT: Back to using the web interface, I guess. PHEW!

Well, this chat network has a weird policy in that some of its servers don't accept connections from everywhere. This is probably what locked you out there (ISTR that the error message is "User has been banned from euIRC" if the ban is valid across the entire network). The solution is to just connect again; chances are very high that you connect to a different server each time.
If you feel fancy, you can configure your client to use a specific server (list at http://www.euirc.net/en/server_admins.php) that works better.
If that doesn't help, the next step is to contact klines@euirc.net and ask them what's going on.

Hey, thanks! I would've try tried again last night after work, but I was stuck in a 12 hour workday, repeating failure after failure.

I sat around for over an hour yesterday and no one said a word. Great chat guys. ^_~

bump.

Connect to the Songfight! chat room by clicking on the following link:

http://jan-krueger.net/sf-irc

Or point your IRC client of choice to the server irc.euirc.net and join #Songfight!

Yes, the exclamation point is mandatory.


(Oh. My timing sucks. Apparently the network is having problems. Anyone else having trouble getting in?)

Hey look, a wiki article

bump.

Usually, during Nur Ein time, the competitors and audience like to check in on each other in real time. There's a way to do that! Just pop on in to the Song Fight IRC Chat Room!

Connect to the Songfight! chat room by clicking on the following link:

http://jan-krueger.net/sf-irc

Or point your IRC client of choice to the server irc.euirc.net and join #Songfight!

Yes, the capital S and exclamation point are mandatory.

Due to repeated issues on euIRC, the channel has moved again.

We are now found on the Mibbit IRC servers at irc.mibbit.net (because that's where the FAWM folks are, too... might be convenient for some of us). Same channel name as before: #songfight!

If you've been using the quick link, you're good: I've just switched it over.

jast wrote:Same channel name as before: #songfight!

Minor correction: It used to be #Songfight! with a capital S, but now it's a lower-case s.

See y'all in there!

Generic wrote:Minor correction: It used to be #Songfight! with a capital S, but now it's a lower-case s.

Sure, but IRC don't care. In fact, in many implementations the exact channel name depends on whatever name the first person to join uses (that's true even if the channel existed before and went empty for some time).

jast wrote:

Generic wrote:Minor correction: It used to be #Songfight! with a capital S, but now it's a lower-case s.

Sure, but IRC don't care. In fact, in many implementations the exact channel name depends on whatever name the first person to join uses (that's true even if the channel existed before and went empty for some time).

I tried to doing #Songfight! and got a "No such channel" error message. Then I joined #songfight! and found you guys. So it would seem that IRC do care. Hence my correction.

One complaint we've had about the chat room in the past is that IRC is "too complicated," and that people just want to click-and-go in this Flash-based webapp day and age. I'm just trying to do my part to reduce the friction of this move (this is, what, the third time we've had to do this?).

The Internet is complicated. Real-time chat is complicated. Many IM clients support IRC nowadays. I use Adium to connect because I already use it for IMing, and I don't want to deal with yet another app running just to have something idle.

If you want to improve things, find any other chat protocol that allows freely-joinable group chat, passively-connected access from any kind of device (ideally there should be clients - hopefully open source - for Mac, Linux, and Windows, and for bonus points there should also be Android and iOS), and has less friction to use than IRC. The fact that IRC is still the de-facto standard for cross-platform group chat tells me that if there is something like this, it hasn't yet caught on - and if we can help it to catch on, that would be great!