Volare Airlines

Volare's subsidiary Air Europe continues to fly some international routes. IRC-Galleria is now officially open for anyone who is over 12 years old and speaks Finnish. Since then, the airline has come out of bankruptcy and is now flying Italian domestic routes. 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 the actual IRC is. Volare suspended its operations in November 2004 and filed for bankruptcy. The administrators responded by introducing some features which aim at the minimization of the biggest problems related to the non-IRC-users. At one time the airline operated flights from Italy to Spain, Germany, France, Belgium, Czech Republic and Romania. 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.

Volare Airlines, also known by its volareweb.com brand, is a low-fares airline based in Italy. The service is financed with banner advertising, SMS-based services, T-shirts and optional VIP privileges which can be bought with SMS. Callsign: Revola. IRC-Galleria is now maintained and developed by Dynamoid Oy, a company founded solely for the sake of IRC-Galleria. ICAO Code: VLE. Comments are only visible to those who are logged in. IATA Code: VA. Some of the communities are named after IRC channels, and joining them requires IRC-based identification.

Each user can be a member of at most 40 communities. The communication in IRC-Galleria is based on short messages, comments, each of which is associated with either a picture or a community. 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. 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.

However, only about 20% of the users have identified themselves as actual users of IRC. About 85% of the users are active users who use the service on a weekly or daily basis. As for February 2006, IRC-galleria boasts of over 302,000 registered users and over 3,600,000 images. It was founded in December 2000 by Tomi Lintelä as a photo gallery for the Finnish users of Internet Relay Chat.

IRC-Galleria is the largest WWW-based virtual community in Finland.