A brief history of the Jollo IRC Network
Introduction
In 2006, a group of friends from Lake Charles, LA. decided to maintain an IRC channel #lauberge on EFnet as an online meet-up spot for chat and keeping in touch after everyone had left for college in different parts of the country. The channel experienced modest growth from its Louisiana origins, attracting frequent users from different parts of the globe.
#Lauberge was world-famous for its Movie Nights, hosted by redguts, where users would receive a secret e-mail invite to gather and watch a hand-picked movie from redguts' VHS collection. Also of interest was the occasional posting of color-codes, mostly inspired by the #pp4l community. In 2009, #Lauberge was used as a teaching tool in the classroom, where students from a local highschool created colorcodes using the freeware Eyerc.exe.
Some time in 2012, fanfare approached bhelx with the idea of starting an IRC-based colorcode chatroom, where colorcodes posted on IRC could be viewable on a sepearte website live in real time.
A spin-off channel was formed.. #yvogvn on EFnet (with the front end available via yvogvn.ru), for the purpose of creating and posting colorcodes. The back-end was programmed by bhelx, and the initial design of the website was very minimal, made to look just like mIRC (with fixedsys, and the same colors). The channel had a nice collection of colorcodes and ran for over a year.
Early inception
Around mid-2013, several users of #Lauberge decided that it might be worth pursuing a dedicated server to run an independent IRCD, migrating away from EFnet and forming a new channel all together. After months of deliberation on the server (codeword novena), the idea eventually came to a standstill, and it was decided that a group-purchase of a collocated server would be too much of a headache. It was around this time fanfare and duxx started to notice a little nutria at Audobon park in New Orleans. They had given the nutria, which lived in the base of a tree, the nick-name "Jollo" .. whose name came from a character in the video-game King's Quest VI.. although the personalities are nothing alike.
Mythos
Fanfare and duxx's naming of animals is rooted back to a unique roach problem duxx had in her apartment while in college. She would call the roaches 'jennifers' ..which somehow made the situation a bit easier. Simliarly, fanfare had a terrible mouse infestation at his apartment in Providence, RI, while he was in school. Duxx recommended fanfare call the mice 'sally' to make the situation more bearable. The naming tradition continued on with "Jollo". Several other little friends were spotted throughout New Orleans over the next few months in 2013-2014, including a wobbling opossum that wandered into a tree stump at City Park which was named 'plinko', and a baby possum chilling near a mushroom in Belle Chasse named 'panko'.
Ratbox
Around the time a few people in #Lauberge were going to go-in on a server, but then those plans fizzled, nill had been talking with fanfare a bit about the ideal IRCD for a new chat server. Nill suggested going with ratbox, which was the same setup used by (and also developed by members of) EFnet, the host for #Lauberge. Frustrated with the dead-end status of the group server project, fanfare decided to just bite the bullet and deploy a digitalocean droplet running ratbox on top of Debian.
Ratbox, also, perfectly fit in with the Jollo rodent mythos.
#Sally
The under-hiatus yvogvn project was reborn on the Jollo server as 'sally' .. and a dedicated room was set up for posting colorcodes and other chat entertainment. One of the main advantages of running a local instance of ratbox (rather than using EFnet, for example) was the ability to disable flood controls, meaning guests of Jollo can paste very long colorcodes if they so please. As was with yvogvn, viewers can see a live happening of #sally on the web-end, http://jollo.org/sally.
Plinko
Early on in 2014, Yahoo! games was shut down. This was a low blow for fans of Literati, which included several users of #Lauberge, which many had migrated over to the new SSL-only Jollo server. Fanfare was becoming interested in the powerful nature of the mIRCscript language and started working on a colorcode IRC version of chess, as a replacement for the depreciatd Yahoo! version. Early in 2015, with the assistance of nill, an instance of mIRC was set up runing on wine on xvfb on linux, to begin setting up a bot for the #sally room, that would aid users in optional nick registration/ownership and possibly integrate a 'parlour games' section. Chess was mostly finished at the time, but Literati was the treasure TO DO item. The opossum that wandered into a stump a year prior was given a special spot in the Jollo ecosystem.. plinko. Plinko went live in early 2015, and graces users with a special illustration by vase upon registration. Fanfare eventually hooked plinko up into the colorcode system running on #Sally to process colorcodes as they are posted, while the original sally bot continues to listen for and record sallies onto a recovery background system. Plinko has since made several cameos IRL in the fanfare/duxx attic.
Parlour Games
In mid-2015, the Literati project was finally complete, and users of Jollo now could enjoy the magic of Yahoo! right from the comfort of IRC with a choice of Chess or Literati. Users of Jollo can sometimes be spotted playing Literati after a Movie Night, which continues to happen every so often as a #Lauberge tradition on Jollo.
Asdf.us/ascii
Initially, the primary editor of choice for Jollo users was the Ascii Pumper program, created by Lampiasis, a member of the #pp4l community. A newcomer to Jollo, user bamboo, set out with creating his own version of a colorcode editor, and hosts it on his website. Contributors to the program also include Jollo user timb. The tool became a hit, with several prominent colorcode posters on #sally using it as their colorcode tool of choice.
The software is proudly licensed under the Jollo LNT License.
Halloween 2015
For halloween in 2015, Plinko treated users to a special night of trick-or-treating, with tricks including getting kicked offline, forcejoined in #oubliette, and treats including special candies and presents drawn by duxx, fanfare, and ffog.
Conclusion
We hope you have enjoyed learning about the history of the Jollo IRC Network. As a privacy-concious service, we are currently looking forward to the progress being made with both mpOTR and np1sec as it will be invaluable to members of the Jollo community. With special thanks to the external services that help make Jollo possible, namely mIRC, ircd ratbox, imagemagick and the debian operating system.
Last edited by fanfare on April 4, 2016.