Our History

1998: Founding and the IRC years

• The beginning. Yudum started in 1998 as an independent IRC server, founded by iNKa, at a time when almost everyone talked through mIRC.
• The culture. In an internet that was still small, it became one of the first places where people met behind nicknames and built friendships that outlasted the software.

The 2000s: Web chat and internet radio

• Chat without a download. Java-based web chat interfaces were added so that people could reach the server straight from the website, without installing mIRC first.
• Yudum Radio. As internet radio took off, the community started its own station with a roster of volunteer DJs. Listening, requesting a song and chatting all happened in the same place.

How a big IRC server was run back then

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, servers of this size were not run like a forum or a Discord guild. The structure was strict, almost military:

• Network Administrator. The owners and founders, with shell access to the machine itself.
• Services Administrator. Looked after the service bots and the database — accounts and channel registrations.
• Server Administrator. Edited the IRCd configuration and was responsible for server security.
• IRC Operator. Kept order in the network and dealt with abuse, flooding and clone attacks.
• HelpOP. Senior members who answered questions about commands and rules in the help channel.

The script era

Back then people connected with their own customised mIRC builds, called scripts:

• Server scripts. Packages that shipped with a radio shortcut, automatic away messages, protection scripts and a ready list of rooms.
• Colour and sound. Coloured text, personalised ASCII-art join and part messages, and WAV sound effects when someone entered a channel.
• Addons. Written in mIRC Scripting Language, added to the client's remote section to protect a channel or answer automatically.

The 2010s: A portal, and competition from social media

• Becoming a portal. As instant messengers and then social networks pulled people away from IRC, the site grew forums, horoscopes, game add-ons and columns, and became a portal in its own right.
• Staying open. Many large chat sites of that generation closed. Yudum stayed up, carried by a core group of regulars.

A change of hands

The network grew under iNKa until 2011, and was then handed to Gokturk and Berat. During that period Yudum was merged with the HybridIRC network and opened up to an international audience. That partnership has since ended and Yudum runs independently again.

The 2020s: Rewriting everything ourselves

Yudum ran on HybridIRC and later UnrealIRCd over the years. None of that is in use any more. Today there is no off-the-shelf IRC daemon and no ready-made services package — every layer is part of one application we wrote:

• Our own server and services. The IRC daemon and all the services were rewritten from scratch in Go and run as a single process.
• WebChat without plugins. The old Java web chat is long gone. The current one runs in the browser as WebAssembly — no Java, no Flash, no extension — over an encrypted connection.
• Voice and video. WebRTC through our own TURN server, working the same on a phone as on a desktop.
• Radio. YudumFM streams around the clock; DJs connect with their own broadcasting software and listeners hear it through an HTML5 player. Song requests are wired into the chat.
• Live streaming. Our own streaming server: RTMP or SRT in, low-latency playback in the browser.
• The site itself. News, dictionary, films, games and software are managed from inside the same Go application rather than a third-party CMS.
• One account. YudumSosyal — profiles, feed, groups, friends and following — shares the account you chat with. What you do on the site shows up in chat, and the other way round.

About Yudum · Help centre