Anime on IRC
IRC or Internet Relay Chat has always been the haven of anime fansub groups, and thus, will always be a key source of anime downloads. On IRC, there are two primary methods used to download anime. One: Through fileservers. Two: Through XDCC bots (generally much faster than fileservers).
There are many advantages in using IRC to get your anime dose. Among them are super-fast speeds (since many XDCC bots are hosted on powerful connections), quick updates, and no locking up due to Bittorrent. However, like the other methods, IRC isn't perfect either.
To the same extent that FTP ports are blocked, IRC ports are usually blocked as well. This means that students and office workers tend to be unable to connect to most IRC servers, preventing them from downloading anime through this medium. Secondly, IRC doesn't support multiple connections, nor are download accelerators supported. There is, however, resume support.
Nevertheless, there are still many who do have access to IRC, and these people should learn how to use it. The best approach is to download a pre-packaged full-featured script such as SysReset, rather than download mIRC itself. From there, just log on to any one of the fansub channels on popular anime servers and download away.
But where are these fileservers, XDCC bots, IRC channels and servers? Well, check out our list of xdcc bot reviews for all the information you'll need.