At the end of my last blog-post, I mentioned something about a website called IRCWhore. This is a new project of mine, which involves making an IRC Network, a feature-rich website, combining them, and making it free for everyone.

At the moment, the website is nowhere near completed. A lot of the core features like registration, login, and features such as password reset have been completed. Features such as the webchat, forums, and personal blog-pages are still in the concept stages, and may not appear for a long time. Features which are proving difficult to conceptualise are:

  • Webchat – Currently, most IRC Networks have a bog-standard webchat which doesn’t offer any form of user-customisation. I plan to make it so that users can customise their webchat the way they like it. This means making it so they can customise the colours, the size and style of the default font, changing the popup’s that appear when the user right-clicks, and more.
  • Forums – This could either go one of two ways, full-custom coded forum from scratch based on existing forum software, or integrate an existing forum board with the website. The second may prove difficult, as I have used my own custom hashing on the passwords. Hopefully, I’ll be able to authenticate the panels by means of cookies and sessions.
  • Blogs – There is a plan in the pipeline for users to create their own custom blog, based on the url http://www.ircwhore.org.uk/blog/user/post. This will hopefully encourage users to start blogging, then once they’ve picked up the art of blogging, they can use blog-hosting services like blogger, and wordpress.com. We need more blogs!
  • Ulysses – Ulysses is our Website=IRC integration bot. The bot is capable of doing absolutely anything (providing it’s within its powers), including killing a ghosted session, requesting an administrator, reporting a webpage on our website by the click of a button, assign an SWHOIS to a user based on their age/gender.

The current time scale for the project is 9 months, so the project is ready to go by the new year. If the project can be completed in 6 months, it will be a bonus. Once new year comes, any feature which isn’t required to make the site work, will be put on a feature-freeze. This means that all the other things which don’t need to exist for the site to work will be held in development, while the rest of the features are completed.