IRC-Galleria


IRC-Galleria is a social networking website in Finland. It was founded in December 2000 by Tomi Lintelä as a photo gallery for the Finnish users of Internet Relay Chat. As of April 2009, IRC-Galleria had over 500,000 registered users and 9 million images. Over 90% of the users are weekly active users.
IRC-Galleria users are required to be 13 years of age or older. The site’s primary language is Finnish. A majority of users are aged between 13 and 22, with the mean age being about 20 years.
IRC-Galleria is now maintained and developed by Herdifier Oy, a company that, in June 2014, purchased the site. The service is financed with advertising, SMS-based services, T-shirts and optional VIP packages.
Today IRC-Galleria operates in several countries in Europe e.g. in Russia, Estonia and Germany.
In recent years IRC-Galleria has had several changes to its aesthetic and user interface.

Technology

IRC-Galleria is a photo gallery and users are required to have at least one accepted image. The maximum number of visible images per user is limited to 60 for regular users an 10,000 for VIP users. A user's default image must contain the user's face.
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 100 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.