What is IRC sharing?
In support of peer-to-peer file sharing, BadBlue supports a concept called friendly machines. When you search BadBlue, the program returns matches found in your shared folders – and will also search the shared areas of friendly machines for matching content. Friendly machines can still be specified manually (i.e., using the Add friendly machines to your search path menu). With version 1.5, BadBlue introduced IRC sharing. BadBlue uses random, public (or private) IRC servers, which you can specify, to find friendly machines. IRC servers allow general Internet users to chat, transfer files and perform other collaborative tasks. In much the same way that AOL Instant Messenger detects and notifies peer groups of friendly user activity, BadBlue uses active IRC sessions to track and share connection information among peer machines without user intervention. To do this, BadBlue logs into IRC as a user and joins a public (or private) channel to look for other instances of BadBlue. It does this
