We use IRC as a central way of communication for our LAN parties, starting in 1998 and spanning at least eight directly connected party series/"brands" over all those years.
The number of attendees ranges from about 100 up to 3,500+ (German record, 2005, still holds), including roughly two dozen parties with 1,000 to 2,500 attendees.
On the orga side, we use it daily for internal discussion and notifications. Events from our own LAN party platform's [1] party web sites (accounts, orders, forum posts, etc.), internal forums, GitLab (issues, CI build results), and social media (followers, mentions) are announced there – using a combination of web hooks, RSS, Zapier, and custom tools ([2], [3]).
These days we use IRC in tandem with a self-hosted Mattermost [4] instance, a bot to bridge between both, and the option to connect to Mattermost with an IRC client. A few things like embedded images get lost on the way, though.
On the parties itself, we run a local IRC server. There is a main party channel with auto-join. Organizers are on IRC both for internal collaboration and monitoring (e.g. [5]) as well as user support.
Tournament players are required to be present in the respective IRC channels for the tournaments they participate in.
Events from the local party intranet [1] (news posts, forum posts, tournament updates) are announced on IRC as well.
A modified version of The Lounge [6] is provided as a simple, web-based alternative as part of our intranet for everyone not used to, or too fond of, a "classic" IRC client.
Last but not least, there's #quiz, running the same MoxQuizz [7] version for ages with questions from the mid-2000s.
That said, our guests usually provide multiple locally public TeamSpeak servers for voice communication.
So while we added some more modern tools and services to the mix (for example a Telegram channel for announcements, reminders and other tiny bits of information), and are considering others (for example Discord, but dependence on Internet connectivity and third-party terms are a massive downside for us), both IRC and LAN parties are totally not dead for us.
The number of attendees ranges from about 100 up to 3,500+ (German record, 2005, still holds), including roughly two dozen parties with 1,000 to 2,500 attendees.
On the orga side, we use it daily for internal discussion and notifications. Events from our own LAN party platform's [1] party web sites (accounts, orders, forum posts, etc.), internal forums, GitLab (issues, CI build results), and social media (followers, mentions) are announced there – using a combination of web hooks, RSS, Zapier, and custom tools ([2], [3]).
These days we use IRC in tandem with a self-hosted Mattermost [4] instance, a bot to bridge between both, and the option to connect to Mattermost with an IRC client. A few things like embedded images get lost on the way, though.
On the parties itself, we run a local IRC server. There is a main party channel with auto-join. Organizers are on IRC both for internal collaboration and monitoring (e.g. [5]) as well as user support.
Tournament players are required to be present in the respective IRC channels for the tournaments they participate in.
Events from the local party intranet [1] (news posts, forum posts, tournament updates) are announced on IRC as well.
A modified version of The Lounge [6] is provided as a simple, web-based alternative as part of our intranet for everyone not used to, or too fond of, a "classic" IRC client.
Last but not least, there's #quiz, running the same MoxQuizz [7] version for ages with questions from the mid-2000s.
That said, our guests usually provide multiple locally public TeamSpeak servers for voice communication.
So while we added some more modern tools and services to the mix (for example a Telegram channel for announcements, reminders and other tiny bits of information), and are considering others (for example Discord, but dependence on Internet connectivity and third-party terms are a massive downside for us), both IRC and LAN parties are totally not dead for us.
[1] https://github.com/byceps/byceps [2] https://github.com/homeworkprod/weitersager [3] https://github.com/homeworkprod/gewebehaken [4] https://mattermost.com/ [5] https://github.com/homeworkprod/syslog2irc [6] https://thelounge.chat/ [7] http://moxquizz.de/