Right now, I’m writing an IRC server, and it’s turning out to be incredibly frustrating so far.

For example, one thing I’ve had trouble with is MODE commands. The documentation in RFC 1459 is barely enough to understand what’s happening, and answers on SO just leave me more confused.

I can’t believe that one of the most popular protocols on the planet has so little documentation.

Luckily, Hexchat has a nice Raw Log feature. You can access this under Settings -> Raw Log in the menu. This allows me to haphazardly construct responses that work with hexchat. Thank God.

With IRC, it’s far easier to reverse engineer the protocol rather than read either RFC on it.