Who else recalls the self-flagellation that was required in order to get any kind of help in #cplusplus or #programming? Took a lot of humility and you had to eat a lot of crow back in those days. ah, seeking help on EFNet - the old rite of passage for young programmers.
Yeah I'd only briefly hang out in the bigger programming channels because of the toxicity. When I was on IRC I would usually stick with a tight-knit group of friends in a private channel. Once IRC started waning, my friends and I left.
I remember being kicked off #unix in Efnet sometime in 200x because I posted the controversial idea that work on IRC began in 1988 and I first compiled a client and got on in 1993.
Isn't it crazy how you remember getting kicked/banned 20 years later? Around the same time (early 200x) I was temp-banned from #cpp or #c++ or whatever after being accused of asking a homework question. I had been active in the channel for awhile by then and simply didn't have homework because I was self-learning with everything I could find.
It just stuck with me because I idolized the people in that room at the time.
Absolutely this brings back memories of the channel takeover battles that used to happen on EFNet back in the days before nickserv and chanserv, or for that matter freenode.net but that was kind of the EFNet culture and the actual ops rarely got involved with individual channels and communities struggles unless it affected the overall network stability.
Freenode was however supposed be run by adults and relatively drama free, i dont know really i kind of drifted away from IRC around the time freenode.net was formed.