Our team at IRCNow wants to make IRC better today without changing the IRC protocol.

We all love IRC because it is simple to code for and easy to understand. It supports a huge number of clients, has a large and mature ecosystem, and has over 100,000 users from all over the globe. IRC is the home of the free and open source community.

But IRC hasn't improved much since it was first invented in 1988. As of 2019, IRC is still incredibly hard for average people to use. It's for this reason that the IRC community has lost over 95% of its users to proprietary chat networks like Facebook, Discord, and Slack.

IRCv3, however, is not fixing any of the major flaws with IRC. As of 2019, IRCv3 still:

1. Does not provide an easy way to upload a file in-band to a public channel (you can't share code snippets, photos, or videos with your irc client, you need to use a web browser)
2. Does not sync messages properly on phones (messages are often lost or repeated)
3. Does not provide recipient confirmations for when a message is delivered (echo-message only provides server confirmations, not recipient confirmations)
4. Does not provide buddy lists
5. Does not provide HTTP tunneling to bypass firewalls
6. Cannot handle frequent disconnects from mobile clients
7. Cannot handle audio/video calls
8. Does not provide a standardized registration interface

We plan to add these necessary features while still maintaining backwards compatibility with all existing irc clients and servers.

If you are interested, please join our network at irc.ircnow.org.