BNC4FREE:About
Who are we?
BNC4FREE is a non-profit organization that specializes in providing Free IRC Bouncers. IRC Bouncers are used to connect to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks primarily but can be configured so that you stay online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and also log messages that were said while you were away. Our objective is to be able to provide IRC Bouncers to nearly every Internet Relay Chat Network in the world completely free of charge while ensuring that our services are as stable and secure as possible unlike some of the other unstable and insecure providers out there.
The History
BNC4FREE started in August 2007 and originally ran completely on donated servers and donated money from its users. When BNC4FREE was started, the founder, Russell didn’t know much about Linux or programming and spent numerous days, nights and months learning more about Linux and programming in order to improve the service and offer more to the users. During this time, we were using psyBNC for bouncer software and had 3 servers with around 50 vhosts on each. As time progressed, it was obvious that psyBNC could not be customised enough or wasn’t dynamic enough for what we wanted to do. At this point, we decided to switch to another bouncer software known as sBNC and continued for a while running this. Later down the line we discovered that there was a new bouncer software available that had more features than the previous 2 we had used. This was called ZNC and we decided to switch to it to offer our users more customisation of their bouncer and more features. Ever since the switch to ZNC, the service has been funded solely by the founder however we have taken numerous donations along the way which have helped us to get better servers and services so that we can provide a better service to the end user. The founder has spent numerous weeks and months customizing the software to fit the needs of BNC4FREE. This included features such as removing the ability for users to change server, numerous administration modules and some bug fixes. The founder also coded an entire module for BNC4FREEs’ IRC Bot during this time so that the handling of accounts and more could be managed from IRC.
In July 2011, BNC4FREE and SurgeHost partially teamed up allowing us to offer Premium IRC Bouncers with more features under the name of BNCFTW/SurgeHost. Since teaming up with SurgeHost/BNCFTW, The company was renamed to EvoSurge and started to provide more services. An executive decision was made in September 2012 that BNC4FREE and EvoSurge should no longer be linked to ensure that BNC4FREE could continue to be represented and work as an entirely non profit organization. Considerable work has been done since then by the staff of BNC4FREE and its founder in order to improve and better our service quality and standard.
BNC4FREE unfortunately closed in 2016 due to lack of funding and time from staff members including the founder. In March 2020, Coronavirus (COVID-19) struck the world and communication via the internet became as important as ever. On that basis, the founder of BNC4FREE using free time and spare money available set about re-launching BNC4FREE as a free service to keep people connected during these difficult times.
Any Questions?
BNC4FREE will always provide a free service with customer service and quality being the main objective. If you are interested in knowing more about BNC4FREE, You can contact us via the following methods:
- Email: Support
- IRC: irc.freenode.net OR Webchat
- Facebook: https://bnc4free.com/facebook
- Twitter: https://bnc4free.com/twitter
- Reddit: https://bnc4free.com/reddit
Credits
Many thanks go to all the companies and individuals listed on our Credits Page for keeping this service alive for as long as it has been.