Bouncer (IRC)

An IRC bouncer is a program that runs on a server in the internet and functions as a proxy between a IRC client and one or many IRC servers.

A IRC bouncer will hold the connection to the IRC server if the client goes offline. To allow the client to cleanly reconnect it needs to do at least some of the state tracking that a client would normally do. Some bouncers store all messages for sending to the irc client on reconnect. However this is generally considered too heavyweight for commercial bouncer hosting. Other bouncers may just log private messages or not log anything at all. Permanent logging and other bot like functions may also be performed by some bouncers rescources permitting.

External links:

• BNC
• psyBNC is a feature-rich IRC bouncer
• ezbounce is another feature-rich IRC bouncer
• muh is a popular IRC bouncer, discontinued
• miau is a late-2002 fork of muh, with more features