It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
IRC is only text chat, Discord does a ton of other things on top.
Personally I’ve been on the internet for the last… 27 years or so? I’ve used ICQ, Teamspeak, Skype, IRC, Mumble, Discord, Teams, … (Probably forgot a few).
I never really liked IRC, yes, it’s private servers which is nice, yes you can be relatively anonymous, but the channels were always a mess. Either too many people spamming so you can’t follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.
Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient. But yeah, not much privacy there obviously (though everything you said in IRC was often saved away by a bot, so either way whatever you said was out there).
CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large troutSure, but when everybody’s Discord content vanishes behind a paywall, or makes you watch a 2 minute advert to see a Wiki, what are you going to do?
Already I can’t just browse the content on a Discord community without “joining” and all that bollocks.
Like I’m sure Discord is better than IRC, but it’s not better than a collection of open standards so anyone can run a server.
I’ve never seen someone host a wiki on Discord… that’s just stupid.
Having to join a server before you see its content is a good thing though. It’s a privacy feature and also anti-spam / anti-bots (Before you see anything you often have to agree to the server rules).
Using Discord for information storage is obviously a bad idea. But for text chat including channels, voice chat and so on it’s fantastic. Most games usually have an extra website with a wiki for information.
Joining to browse is in no way a good thing. Join to speak, yes. Join to read, no.
I think your view of servers here is wrong. They are literally named communities, as in private spaces. You get access if you’re part of that community, otherwise you don’t.
Discord servers are not public websites or a wiki anyone can access, they are not supposed to be.
IRC is a tiny bit more open, but even there you need to join a channel to read it and you can get kicked out. For reading the logs a bot saved away you might need an account too (but that’s up to the server admin or whoever is hosting that content).
Issue with what you are saying is that I have seen a crap ton of software ( Foss software too ) using discord forums / discord I’m general as their “knowledge base” making it quite hard to find solutions for problems or ask questions, where in the past you’d be using a forum for.