Official ChatNet History

Chatnet was formed in early 1996 and was formed by former undernet users. For years Chatnet had K9, a similar version to X/W from the time.

The original K9 was similar to the old X/W from undernet in it had it's "levels" ranging from 0 to 500 (above 500 for channel service members) commands like OP, DEOP, VOICE, DEVOICE, KICK, BAN were level 100 others like ADDUSER, REMUSER, etc, were level 400 and ADDMASK, REMMASK, GUARDT, and GUARDM were level 450. The channel owners had access to all those commands, and the only ones they were privy to were the SAY, ACT, and SND commands to make the bot do silly things in the channel.

The unique thing i found about K9 was because of his name, people gave him a personality, he was referred to as "the dog" and the regular members of the network had an affection for their channel services unlike any other network. Sunday afternoon's #k9_101 was one of the largest channel's on the entire network for an hour or so of K9 training.

How one got K9 for thier channel was to goto the channel services website and fill out the web form, you had to have so many supporters and it took several days for an application to be approved or denied.

The newer version of k9/dogtag is based on a chanserv/nickserv type, k9 (chanserv) has been modified to have similar levels and commands as the old k9 that everyone loved. While dogtag is the new nickserv for chatnet.

Chatnet has some pretty nifty things that made it unique. Halloween will always be a special day on the network. That is the day K9 would leave and his alte-ego Cujo would join and the entire network would take on the Halloween theme.

Servers came and servers went. Chatnet changed from a pure ircu, to a hacked up version of ircu. Finally when the last original Chatnet server left (portland.or.us.chatnet.org), so did channel services which were hosted there. After quite a long time of anarchy and chaos on chatnet, the network switched to bahumet. A simple version of nickserv/chanserv was modified to have the names Dogtag/k9 and was brought online prematurely. Around this time a large number or turkish hackers, some of which were in the adminstration of chatnet turned their attention to attacking chatnet. Chatnet lingered another 8 months with no services and unstable servers. Dogtag/K9 were rewritten, but a few weeks after they were brought back, the attacks on chatnet became severly intense. Now, one is lucky to connect to anything resembling chatnet.

Chatnet has always been a medium sized network, its peak average userload hovered just over 4000 concurrent users in early 2001 and had 3000+ concurrent users on average from the beginning of 2000 until the later half of 2003

In February of 2008 ChatNet moved to Unreal IRCD and now uses a modified version of Anope services. We have a steady following of around 250 users and we seem to grow a little each week. Take the time to stop by and visit with us.