So What was Discussed?

A Common Predicament for IRC users!

Clubs and Groups are an integral part of college life. They create a more friendly and open environment among everyone and also help a lot of people. Recently, the computer club, I am a part of, planned to organise online sessions for our juniors. The programme was meant to help out freshers and other juniors with basics of general topics like algorithms, data structures, machine learning and so on. Going by the fact that it is extremely light weight, we finalised IRC  as the platform for discussions. 

If you have used IRC before, you will knowing that in IRC, there is no mean of retrieving a conversation if you have missed (maybe because you were too lazy to join on time or your network provider hates you). The only thing you can do in this situation is that some angel who has been connected since the beginning of the session to post the logs. We realised that this might lead to a few people missing a few important messages and then become unable to catch up with their friend who were always connected. 

To solve this problem, we came with the idea of an active log of our IRC session and used the naivest way to achieve it. We found our solution in two unlikeliest of allies, with the first being an IRC Bot and the second being Github. We simply built an IRC Bot which can connect and listen to any of our channel and can keep pushing the whole conversation to a Github repository in a periodic manner. As I said, it was an extremely naive solution but it turned out to very effective. We had instances of people attending the entire session by reading the active logs as they were unable to connect to IRC for a reason or other.

You can find the implementation of this bot here.