The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

The #Dominions IRC channel on Gamesurge is quite popular among Dom3 newcomers and veterans alike. Just for fun, I've made a video that showcases the social component of it in form of a graph: The users are represented as nodes and edges are being formed when somebody addresses or mentions another user. The more this happens, the stronger the link grows. The links and the nodes vanish from the cache again after a while when they're not being reinforced. In that case, the graph may break up into multiple connected components, until all its members vanish or a new link happens to join them together again.

The video tracks the development over about two weeks of chat - look at the timestamp at the bottom racing forward. If you don't like the background music, try the other video instead.

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

Very cool. I love stuff like this. I saw a more graphical version of what you are doing demonstrated on Lifehacker about 2 months ago. They were using it to track opensource development. Nodes represented people who submitted code and the edges were formed by activity. In that example, the Nodes would move around the project like bees moving around a honeycomb. Thanks for sharing!

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

nice :)

Now I wonder where could I find an easy to use, free, IRC client?

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

Popular ones I've encountered include trillian, mirc, chatzilla if you use firefox/mozilla. Pyg is actually using (female dog)x, I'm not sure how easy that one is. I'm sure there are many more :)

*(female dog) is a replacement for another word which just happens to be censored on the forums.

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

Pidgin is extremely easy to use.

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

2:40 - Jurri and Sombre discuss ways to kill Maerlande.

2:45 - Maerlande dies.

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

:lol

Is that truth or fiction btw?


I subscribed to gamesurge. Tried a few IRC clients -chatzilla, bersirc and kvirce. They all had issues connecting to gamesurge IRC.
Chatzilla can't do the authserv thingi
bersirc can't be configured to authserv
kvirc looks the best so far but fails to connect as well.

Clearly it's my lack of experience with IRC at work here :)
I'll try again tomorrow, maybe I'll have better luck.

Thanks for the pointers I'll check them as well.

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

mIRC is quite easy to use, it has horrible amount of settings but it can be set to automatically auth you and connect to gamesurge and so on. There's bound to be plenty of tutorials around if you just google stuff. I use Irssi myself, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone not familiar with commandline based stuff (vs. the normal graphical interface most clients and programs offer). Also, if you seriously have trouble connecting to a server, I'd be willing to bet that the problem is in NAT/Firewall settings and not in the client.

Re: The social network of the #Dominions chat channel
 

Very cool lch. I might want to borrow that code.