A/S/...anybody, anybody?

January 18, 2008 7:36 PM

Other than #mefi, Are there any chat rooms or chat services still out there not full of spambots?

I know the question was asked years back, but there seem to be very limited chat spaces and since I won't be able to go out for a bit, I thought I'd query the hivemind.

posted by StrikeTheViol to Human Relations (7 answers total)

http://metachat.org/wiki/IRC_Channels
posted by pompomtom at 7:41 PM on January 18, 2008

Best answer: I've had good experiences setting up chatrooms on Buzzen and Sparkpea.
posted by amyms at 8:01 PM on January 18, 2008

I hesitate to mention this, because it may not be a useful answer to you, but it may be of interest.

the very nerdy xkcd has recently implemented an experimental bot moderator to keep the signal/noise ratio low. Regardless of whether it fits your needs, it's an interesting concept. Read about it on the xkcd blog. I've never logged into the channel, but I expect the chat skews towards technical topics.
posted by fishfucker at 8:57 PM on January 18, 2008

I can't do ratios
posted by fishfucker at 8:57 PM on January 18, 2008

i think you want to keep the SNR ratio high..
posted by virga at 9:23 PM on January 18, 2008 [2 favorites]

Freenode isn't that bad, althought there are a lot of highly opinionated, self righteous, college student geeks on there. Most of the channels are quite technical (#java, #apache, etc) but there are more general interest channels (#photography for example) as well.
posted by jedrek at 5:15 AM on January 19, 2008

If you're interested in roleplaying, Darkmyst.org is a medium sized (2k-3k, I think) network. The y also have lots of UO shard channels, and as far as I remember worth1000.com hosts their irc there if you're a member. There seem to be very few problems, except for an occasional (maybe once a month) small netsplit, and pretty much no spambots.

Here's a list of public channels there:
Dynamically Generated Channels List
posted by Glitter Ninja at 2:58 PM on January 19, 2008