Certain members of the #TCPA IRC channel on EFnet, where is also located #cemetech and our own channel #omnimaga, has started a project a few days ago that involves the revival of the formerly active #TI channel. Back in the late '90s, #TI was used as primary calculator discussion on EFnet but eventually became less active as most people used #TCPA as primary calc chat. #TI was also cracked somewhere around 2004, leaving the channel inaccessible for over a year.

Currently, there are 3 major TI calculator-related channels available:

#TCPA: Originally used by the TI Calculator Programming Alliance programming group, it remained active as a general channel even after the disbanding of the team in 2001 and is currently used as primary channel for Ticalc.org, MaxCoderz, RevSoft and Detacheds Solutions. This channel has discussion about computers, OSes, hardware and general calculator discussion. This channel promotes free speech and unabridged discussion, while keeping randomness to a limit. The channel ranges from 50 to 60 users excluding the bots and activity, according to their log list, averages at 100 KB of text per day.

#Omnimaga: The Omnimaga channel opened on July 18th 2005 as add-on to the forum that opened not long before. The discussion in this channel is mostly focused on video games, computers, anime and calculator game and projects. To keep the environment as friendly as possible, this channel moderation is stricter, although it is more lax on randomness. This channel ranges from 15 to 30 users excluding the bots and duplicates. This channel is slightly more active than #TCPA.

#Cemetech: The Cemetech channel opened around 2005 under the name #ltwttf, later renamed to its current name. The discussion in this channel is mostly focused on video games, FreeBuild (LEGO game), computers, hardware and occasionally calculators. Like #TCPA, this channel promotes unabridged discussion, but like #omnimaga, is more lax on randomness. This channel averages at 15 users and is still active, although its activity level is unknown.

The two goals of the #TI revival project would be to unify the TI community by creating a place where everyone could come to talk about calculators and interact with users of other communities, while still keeping the other channels around. Basically #TCPA would keep the off-topic discussion. #Omnimaga would remain about TI calculators, but when we cannot awnser questions by new users, we would redirect them to #TI instead of #TCPA. We do not know the plans for #Cemetech.

While we plan to continue maintaining #omnimaga IRC channel as it is, and still encourage our users to pop in from time to time, we hope that the revived #TI channel will help developers who don't frequent all 3 other channels at once to stay in touch easier, while not hindering other channels calculator user base and activity. It will also hopefully make it easier for newbies to receive real-time help on programming and general questions.

Original article about the project: http://nykida.net/2010/01/20/uniting-the-community-reviving-ti/

Yeah I just mentionned the channels that are still active. There are a lot of others which has been inactive for a decade, and some that were formerly active like one or two years ago, like #unitedti, #tifreakware, #tiasm and #tibasic. United-TI is on a different network, though. There's also a freenode calc channel that isn't active and #TIGCC on Freequests. It is much easier to get banned in #TIGCC than #omnimaga, though.