Editing IRC (section)

===Undernet fork===
Another fork effort, the first that made a lasting difference, was initiated by "Wildthang" in the United States in October 1992. (It forked off the EFnet ircd version 2.8.10). It was meant to be just a test network to develop bots on but it quickly grew to a network "for friends and their friends". In Europe and Canada a separate new network was being worked on and in December the French servers connected to the Canadian ones, and by the end of the month, the French and Canadian network was connected to the US one, forming the network that later came to be called "The [[Undernet]]".<ref name="stenberg"/>

The "undernetters" wanted to take ircd further in an attempt to make it use less bandwidth and to try to sort out the channel chaos ([[netsplit]]s and [[IRC takeover|takeovers]]) that EFnet started to suffer from. For the latter purpose, the Undernet implemented timestamps, new routing and offered the CService—a program that allowed users to register channels and then attempted to protect them from troublemakers. The first server list presented, from 15 February 1993, includes servers from the U.S., Canada, France, Croatia and Japan. On 15 August, the new user count record was set to 57 users.<ref name="stenberg"/>

In May 1993, RFC 1459<ref name="rfc 1459 1 introduction">{{cite IETF|rfc=1459|title=Internet Relay Chat Protocol|sectionname=Introduction|section=1|page=4|idanchor=ietf}}</ref> was published and details a simple protocol for client/server operation, channels, one-to-one and one-to-many conversations.<ref name="stenberg"/> A significant number of extensions like CTCP, colors and formats are not included in the protocol specifications, nor is character encoding,<ref name="rfc 1459 2.2 character codes"/> which led various implementations of servers and clients to diverge. Software implementation varied significantly from one network to the other, each network implementing their own policies and standards in their own code bases.