This channel has been around for like, 14 years
It started out under a too-silly-to-ever-acknowledge name on WinMX around 2003 after the host of the previous furry chat (The Furry Haven, thank you Xolo!) on that decentralized program stepped down.
Once WinMX's core servers shut down in 2005 and after it became impractical to keep it going, it moved to Furnet. It dropped for a while and was reopened shortly after under the name Bobchannel.
The reason for this was fourfold:
- Bobskunk had run a fairly good community for a while
- A lot of big chats he's been in have allowed some pretty awful behavior
- He knew a whole lot of cool people that would probably like each other but otherwise never interact
- He was utterly terrible at names! See also: his own fursona name
Yep, Bobchannel was named that as a massive joke, but it's not about Bob so much as it is about bridging those Kevin Bacon-style connections.
It had its ups and downs, people came and left on good and bad terms. At one point it was in the top 10 of FurNet channels. At several points, Bobskunk messed up, learned from it, and attempted to change himself. He doesn't blame anyone who left in some of those bad times and conflicts in the least. He also feels really weird writing this stuff out in the third person.
The latest development was how FurNet and IRC in general started showing cracks, which had hosted the channel with a few gaps for the past 12 years, started showing cracks. Netsplits were more and more frequent, the protocol was a pain to handle in today's ever-connected world even with a bouncer, and now there're a swarm of racist darknet spambots connecting to every channel in every server advertising a bunch of jerks.
So now we're on Discord, and finally it feels like we've caught up to the modern age. It was a tall order asking anyone to install and learn IRC in 2017, and it's really nice to have the voice/gaming/inline image stuff that literally everything else had over IRC at that point.