IRCv3 in 2026: 48 Specs, Only 3 Required, 13 Still Drafts — and a Website That Out-Commits the Spec Repo 1,064 to 604

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 2026-10-11, someone posted ircv3.net — the bare homepage, no news, no release note — to Hacker News. It reached 345 points and 292 comments. The exact same URL was posted on 2016-10-09 and reached 595 points and 217 comments. Ten years apart, the same page, the same audience, roughly the same volume of argument.

That is either a story about a protocol with unusual staying power, or a story about a standards process that has been visibly not-finishing the same work for a decade. The interesting thing is that IRCv3 publishes enough machine-readable data about itself to check which one it is. So I checked.

Specification Coverage on SoloSoft

IRCv3 in 2026: 48 Specs, Only 3 Required, 13 Still Drafts — and a Website That Out-Commits the Spec Repo 1,064 to 604