IRC-Galleria

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IRC-Galleria Website

IRC-Galleria is the largest WWW-based virtual community in Finland. It was founded in December 2000 by Tomi Lintelä as a photo gallery for the Finnish users of Internet Relay Chat (IRC). As of November 2006, IRC-galleria boasts over 380,000 registered users and five million images [1]. About 85% of the users are active users who use the service on a weekly or daily basis^{[citation needed]}. However, less than 20% of the users have identified themselves as actual users of IRC^{[citation needed]}.

IRC-Galleria is officially open to anyone who is over 12 years old and speaks Finnish. Most of the users are aged between 13 and 20, with the mean age being about 19 years.^[1] The website gets approximately 310,000 unique hits per day, and 2.2 billion single hits per month. An estimated 65% of Finnish people aged between 15 and 17 visit IRC-Galleria.^[2]

1 Technology
2 Problems
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Technology

Despite all the features, IRC-Galleria is basically a photo gallery and it is not possible to have a user account without at least one accepted image. The maximum number of visible images per user is 60 (only for VIP-users), and the so-called default image must contain the face of the user.

Communication in IRC-Galleria is based on short messages, comments, each of which is associated with either a picture or a community. Each user can be a member of at most 40 communities. Some of the communities are representations of actual IRC channels, and joining them requires IRC-based identification. Comments are only visible to those who are logged in.

IRC-Galleria is now maintained and developed by Dynamoid Oy, a company founded solely for the sake of IRC-Galleria. The service is financed with banner advertising, SMS-based services, T-shirts and optional VIP privileges.

[edit] Problems

The unwillingness of the administrators of IRC-Galleria to exclude non-IRC-users has caused some schism, driving a few users to found their own alternative gallery services with a mandatory IRC-based registration. The administrators responded by introducing some features which aim at the minimization of the biggest problems related to the non-IRC-users.

The non-IRC-users registered in IRC-Galleria are sometimes ironically called galleriairkkaajat (gallery IRCers) due to the fact that many of them frequently refer to IRC-Galleria with the acronym IRC without necessarily even having a clue what IRC actually is.