Also, don't forget that most people online nowadays, at least in the manga fandom, are quite young, so their ignorance of IRC is predictable.

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IRC used to be the easiest way to get scans and subs for me. Now I only ever use it to chat on justin.tv while I watch the streams

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Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.

I don't know about bullying, as I've never seen or heard of it going on in any of the channels I've been in. At least not bullying of individual people. One group bullying another maybe.

As for the talking to a wall:
I've run many IRC rooms over the past 11 years. I think people sometimes have unnaturally high expectations for the rate at which people will respond on IRC. Especially in smaller IRC channels, you may get someone who is in need of assistance and signs onto IRC. They ask their question, don't get a response within 2 or 3 minutes, than rage quit. I see it again and again and again.

There's occasionally also the issue of someone coming into a room, asking a question, and other people in the room continue their conversation and don't respond at all to the question asked. I find that in most of these situations, its not because the regulars didn't read the question, but because they didn't have an answer. But people end up taking this very personally, and often end up doing things that may result in them getting banned (such as spamming, or PM-ing everyone with an op by their name).

Always! To chat about manga and scanlation alike sometimes, but mostly to download stuff. In fact, I pretty much use IRC(and the occasional DDL) only these days to get my manga fix, since bittorent is so slow for me. I think my ISP has been throttling p2p traffic for awhile now, because no matter what I tried to speed it up, I always get atrocious speeds compared to everyone else.

So I'm always in search of new XDCC bots and fserves to get my manga (and anime!) fix.

mIRC is such a thing of beauty.

The best thing about IRC is that it's so minimal. No bells & whistles, no ads, no ugly lay-outs. Just a boring old chatbox with hidden treasures.

+1

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Mikan
Natsume
Ruka/Luca
Hotaru
Tsubasa
Inchou
Nobara
other people that i didn't mention
never seen or read it