About QuakeNet

QuakeNet was founded in 1997 by Garfield and Oli as an IRC network for Quakeworld players who wanted their own 'haven' from other networks. It quickly attracted players of both Quakeworld and other games and had a few hundred users before long. Mag and Madhacker introduced an early version of the service bot 'Q' around this time. Around the early 2000's IRC become extremely popular and QuakeNet exploded in size alone with several other networks collectively known as the 'big four' comprising of QuakeNet, EFnet, IRCnet and UnderNet (Dalnet had a brief rise during this period too). Before long QuakeNet was one of the biggest IRC networks in the world and regularly claiming the prize as the largest peaking at nearly a quarter of a million concurrently connected users at any one time in 2005.

IRC has dropped a little from its peak of popularity, however it remains a strong and popular communications platform for a myriad of social and work groups. No service has eclipsed IRC as a multi-user text based communications platform so far, the rise of instant messaging does not compare to the features offered by an IRC network. No one individual or company runs or controls a large IRC network, they consist of groups of administrators who vote on issues and provide a balanced and fair oversight of the network.

This website is built using a great many awesome technologies, including:

• Newserv (QuakeNet's modular network service)
• nterfacer (interactive external interface to Newserv)
• Python & Django
• Apache & nginx
• Memcached & python-memcache
• Lucene, solr & solrpy
• Postgres & psycopg2
• OpenSSL & pyOpenSSL