Why do we need it?

Preamble

IRC is dying… the biggest nets are losing their users. Why? Because there are lots of other chats: the messengers, jabber, ICQ, MSN… The clock is ticking, but IRC is still in a good position. It is still a kind of command-line application. You have to remember the commands to register nicks, channels, whilst writing many complex commands to auto-identify. There are lots of channels and user modes, etc - it is too complex for new users.

And the bigest problem isn't actually the IRC clients, but the structure of IRC. There are a lot of scripts that add GUI commands to control channels via ChanServ, to register nicks, etc. But they are all limited to one or two networks.

Why?

Try to implement a universal auto-identify with basic features: On a password request your identify command should send the password and then either;

a) Continue if the password is okay and perform after-auth steps
or
b) Ask the user to input the right password if it is wrong.

It is impossible due to lots of services translations/modifications, because the services are different on every network. Every services developer implements his own services commands and even uses different nicks for the services. This way, it is impossible for the clients to be compatible with every services bot because there are just too many.

So users have to learn and use commands on the command line. In the age of Mac, beryl and Vista, it looks like being in the stone age sometimes, and IRC will lose more and more users every year.

What is IRC+?

IRC+ is a new standard for IRC services. Services will be forced to use similar replies, easy to parse by a script, IRC client developer or botmaker.

It will make it possible