I looked on the channel list and there isn't a support channel, so they must not have services n, they did say it was a basic IRCd

Sadly, much to my chagrin, IRC is going the way of the dodo.  As far as I know it's still the best Intenet group chat program, but few younger people seem to know about it.

I love IRC.  I've been using it since the early days of the Internet (1994, 1995) and use it even more today.  (In the old days, at the universities, you would access your e-mail through PINE and then you'd connect to the IRC through that window.  Does anyone else remember PINE?)

I really wish more young folks would learn about it because it is so much better than XFire and the other chat programs; it's the best interface for large group chat.  Sadly, people who are new to the Internet hardly know what it is or that it exists.

An anecdotal example is the Unreal Tournament community.  There's a huge difference in the number of people using it to talk about each progressive game in the series.  The people who played the original Unreal Tournament (1999) used it profusely and still use it heavily to this day.  The IRC was a central component of the UT99 clan community.  It's where clan matches were organized and clan match style pickup games (PUG matches) are formed.  In contrast, few UT 2004 players, at least few North American UT 2004 players, ever used it.