##Orz is a chat group on various IM networks, originally started as a Freenode IRC channel in 2012. Once also known as H₂Orz, it was previously the leading Chinese "flooding" group due to constantly having many simultaneous parallel conversations between hundreds of members, its largest message volume would have flooded or even crashed your chat client in the past!
But it's all history now. These days, it's mostly a group for casual chats by former members (who once witnessed its traffic during its golden age), but newcomers are still welcomed.
##Orz was created by active members specialized in Internet, tech, programming and FOSS projects. Nevertheless, our motivation is to provide a space for free discussions, regardless to topics or backgrounds.
All logging activities by humans or bots must receive explicit permission from the group's operators if the log is transferred to a third-party, such as the public Internet, a GenAI provider, etc.
Chat messages are forwarded between different platforms by custom-developed bots, including LiberaChat IRC, Matrix, Telegram and XMPP. Tox, Tor and I2P were also experimented with in the past.
Originated from IRC culture, the study, development, and experiment of bots, or programs act and talk like people, that play practical functions for fun and convenience, is fairly popular within the group.
Auto-talk bots are allowed if the frequency and message lengths are kept low, but most bot functions (other than auto-talk) should be command-triggered. Highly talkative bots must be approved by operators as exceptions.
For digital autonomy considerations, the group is now in the progress of migrating from Telegram to Matrix as the new self-hosting chat platform. Telegram and XMPP are now considered legacy, their continued uses are no longer recommended, and may be discontinued in the future.
In the future, the Matrix group will replace IRC and Telegram as the new central hub of people and bots. All existing bots will be updated to keep up with this change.
For more information, join the LiberaChat IRC channel ##Orz and read the channel topic.
Since the abolishment of Freenode in favor of LiberaChat due to its mismanagement, we've lost the administrative control of LiberaChat's ##Orz - some members joined the unregistered LiberaChat channel (via the incorrectly-styled name ##orz, instead of ##Orz) before our team members were able to formally register it. The first one who did so became the temporary channel operator. When this member quitted from the channel (likely within hours), the operator status has been permanently lost.
As a result, nobody had administrative control over the channel in the past 4 years. Daily conversations functioned as normal, but nobody was able to make any change to the channel, including setting a topic or correcting the incorrect styling the of channel name from ##orz to ##Orz.
Since the channel is always constantly occupied by our members (mostly by unsupervised IRC bouncers and bots), regaining the temporary channel operator status by asking everyone to quit from the channel was not an option. Today, with the help from LiberaChat's sysop moonmoon, we were able to formally re-register the channel. As required by moonmoon, we invited online members to return to their keyboards behind their always-online IRC bouncers, so that an ad-hoc vote by chat messages could be conducted. We regained administrative rights after passing a majority vote. The channel topic has finally been corrected today.
Unfortunately, due to the recent mismanagement at Freenode and the purge of all existing registered channels and nicknames, ##Orz, as a Freenode channel, no longer exists. The ##Orz channel on both the "old" and "new" Freenode servers is discontinued and no longer under our maintenance. RIP, ##Orz.
Please migrate to LiberaChat.
Currently, the XMPP bot has been updated to forward messages to LiberaChat, but the Telegram bot is not updated yet.
Stay tuned.
A long time ago, erhandsome kindly provided the domain and server for ##Orz. Since then, the server has been moved to orz.chat, but the XMPP account for message forwarding, orz@erhandsome.org, has been kept and staying in use indefinitely for compatibility reasons.
Finally, despite the troubles, we decide to start the migration! Now, XMPP forwarding is provided by orz@orz.chat. All existing members should quit from the original erhandsome account and switch to the new one.
In the transitional phase, both the new and old services are forwarding identical copies of messages. Due to the complexity of forwarding messages between three groups, some services may crash and cause the messages to be out-of-sync, please report any bugs, malfunctions and issues in the group. The old service will be disabled eventually.Happy New Year! As a gift, img.orz.chat now redirects you to a JavaScript image viewer, if an unsupported browser is detected. This should fix the frequent complaints of Telegram's WebP stickers. The JavaScript decoder is 100% Free Software and LibreJS-compatible, no 0day exploits or Bitcoin miners!
The incident has been resolved, all services are back online.
Currently, almost the entire infrastructure and services in ##Orz are offline, including basic forwarding between IRC, Telegram and XMPP. Chatting is impossible, and so far there's no any ETA nor schedules about when they are coming back. Meanwhile, we suggest our members to find other things to do.
After the routine maintenance, our XMPP server is now performing key exchange and encryption with X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 for all compatible servers and clients. It's a major step to enhance the security of TLS protocol to defend our communications.
Meanwhile, XMPP is now available over Tor and i2p to further protect your privacy, see the updated information below for addresses. In addition, S2S traffic is now being federated with Beijing GNU/Linux User Group via Tor, adding another layer of protection to inter-server (S2S) traffic.
Due to a system issue, XMPP/IRC forwarding bot has stopped working for a while. This problem has been solved.
##Orz is now on Irc2P, the built-in IRC of i2p!
[13:05:02 UTC] <madoka> Okay, the ownership issue of ##Orz on i2p has been resolved.
[13:05:03 UTC] <madoka> I hereby declare the opening of ##Orz on i2p! May Madoka bless your anonymity!
Currently, ##Orz uses a XMPP implementation with long history, first as a simple service from Chinese Vim and ArchLinux community, that later have been expanded to serve for ##Orz. But it cannot fit our requirements anymore, it cannot handle abuses, such as mail-address gathering for spams, or MITM attacks. Now, the next generation of our XMPP code has been planned, for better security, specifically to mitigate those issues, at the same time providing smoother user experience, for example, handles images automatically; sends an Attention notice to users that are mentioned in the group chat.
Since September 2015, members who chat with Telegram have encountered crashes, due to large amount of messages recieved from the group, anyway, the problem could be attributed to the unstable early Telegram client, rather than the talkative members. But today, A member observed that a mature XMPP client also crashed just after trying to recieve messages from ##Orz.
We are surely the leading flooding group!
Update: utf8everywhere.org have accepted our translation, now it is located officially at http://utf8everywhere.org/zh-cn! (Sep 28)
As Chinese speakers who frequently encounter character-encoding issues, our members of ##Orz believe the proper use of UTF-8 is the only best way to code in a diverse and multi-culture world.
We have translated The UTF-8 Everywhere Manifesto from utf8everywhere.org to Chinese!
Click to read UTF-8 遍地开花 —— 宣言 in Simplified Chinese.
##Orz is accessible from
Join us now from your favorite network!
##Orz provides a XMPP server for our members, registration is open for the general public.
The XMPP server is reachable from the Internet, Tor and i2p networks.
Tor v3 refers to the Next Generation of Tor Hidden Service, currently has been included in the latest stable branch, 0.3.2.x. We strongly recommend you to use it, if your Tor version is 0.3.2 because of improved security. It doesn't work for older versions, however. If you want to reach our XMPP server via Tor or i2p, read this tutorial from The Calyx Institute, don't forget to change the hostname.
If you have a question related to ##Orz, please contact us via E-mail.