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IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing featu

IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.

mugsie 11y ago
> making it poor for community building eh... slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services. - http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it.html http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-... Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem, and there is quite a few high quality mobile and desktop clients for IRC.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  > eh... slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services. That has nothing to do with Slack-like apps, and everything to do with Slack. > Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem I am part of many FOSS communities on IRC. None of them have "fixed" that problem. There might be one or two that archive the channel somewhere. That is no substitute for real in-app persistence and search.
  - mugsie 11y ago
    http://eavesdrop.openstack.org http://eavesdrop.openstack.org - all channels, all meetings, in a nice index and searchable format (i.e. google search with site:http://eavesdrop.openstack.org http://eavesdrop.openstack.org <query>) There is a reason slack has a problem with that - scaling is hard. There is also the advantage of not having silos - if I have a problem with a dependant library I can "/j #libname" and ask a question, instead of searching for what slack, or slack like tool they use, signing up, installing whatever app is needed to access it, and asking the question (and remembering what app they used, so I can keep it open for issues that run over a few days.)
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Frankly, itistoday2 is right - the fact that I have to open an external website and open the multiple pages for the days I've been away, instead of simply scrolling up and continuing the discussion, makes for a terrible experience. Detachable screen sessions make up somewhat for it, but they're still pretty limited (you might have /joined the channel only later), and it requires a personal service running, that must be attended to & etc.
- pilsetnieks 11y ago
  > slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services Apart from the tech problems with 1000+ sized teams, it's insane even considering the free tier with a 10'000 message limitation for 8000+ users.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Our company (a three-letter megacorp) uses Slack with a 1000+-sized team just fine. However, that "team" represents our whole division; there are then hundreds of channels within it for different individual teams, prefixed with department names. Thus, no individual channel (#dept-team) has more than ~100 subscribers. Slack scales just fine when run this way. So the team size isn't itself the problem; instead, it's the idea of wanting 8000 active subscribers in the same single channel that doesn't scale. Doesn't work on Slack; doesn't work on IRC, either. At the scale of 8000 "viewers", you need the sort of specialized "presentation" software used for managing MOOC lectures and corporate shareholder calls, with fan-out servers, voting indicators, and the ability to "raise your hand" to ask the presiding officer to grant you a temporary +v.
kefka 11y ago
> IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A channel stays a channel until nobody's in it. It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. > Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Like on freenode #reprap , #3dscanning , and thousands of other topic based channels? And setting private bit is easy as a channel operator to limit who shows up. And with completely public and open protocols, anyone can make an awesome IRC client. I have one already on my phone. And there's also bots that can store and send files via http or ftp. I could also make one that saves/retrieves via Box, Dropbox, or any other storage medium trivially. Node-red makes that easy.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  > It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. I have actually done that, and I know it's not trivial. Few want to spend time tinkering with bots and hooking together archiving services. They want a nice Slack-type experience.
  - CDRdude 11y ago
    It certainly wouldn't be trivial for me, but I can't discount kefka saying it's trivial. There are lots of developers better than I am, and their trivial tasks are my extremely difficult challenges.
    - kefka 11y ago
      I just did it :) Come to https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ room #hntesting I'm kefka, and my bot is hn_kefka_bot talk and PM, and then check the Dropbox log.
  - kefka 11y ago
    Well. Words are cheap. I do appreciate CDRdude speaking up for me. Here you go. http://webchat.freenode.net http://webchat.freenode.net room #hntesting Files end up on Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ukffgmwntypfg4m/ircchatlog.txt?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ukffgmwntypfg4m/ircchatlog.txt?dl=... Searching wouldn't be too difficult. That's just loading the data up in a Hadoop and then regurgitating it. The only 'doop cluster I have now is a semi-production one. Working on getting a 150 node set up at the hackerspace. __________________________ Edit: Added time date stamps, and indication/handling for private messages to the bot. Privs now allow me to extend the functionality of the bot to do all sorts of things, like upload to MongoDB, email all logs, kick users, save to BOX, or manipulate the neopixel strip in my room.
pnathan 11y ago
> The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A well-tended IRC server has those via bots. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of > topic-focused channels wut? This is totally easy in IRC: /join #topic-channel makes the channel > private channels I'm tempted to say that a bot can provide that... but sure. > and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Not buying that, sorry, I've been happy with my mobile/desktop clients; they are relatively full-featured.
- ashark 11y ago
  Does your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?
  - mugsie 11y ago
    yes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.
    - darklajid 11y ago
      Honest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.
      - ashark 11y ago
        I looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC. [1] http://colloquy.info http://colloquy.info [2] http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html
sirn 11y ago
> The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. At very least for the persistence part, there is a proposal to add CHATHISTORY batch type[1] to IRCv3 which should allow the server to replay chat history on join (or on request). Search is something else that probably need a little bit more work (especially for a server-side search), though. [1]: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/156 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/156

mugsie 11y ago

> making it poor for community building eh... slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services. - http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it.html http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-... Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem, and there is quite a few high quality mobile and desktop clients for IRC.

itistoday2 11y ago
> eh... slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services. That has nothing to do with Slack-like apps, and everything to do with Slack. > Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem I am part of many FOSS communities on IRC. None of them have "fixed" that problem. There might be one or two that archive the channel somewhere. That is no substitute for real in-app persistence and search.
- mugsie 11y ago
  http://eavesdrop.openstack.org http://eavesdrop.openstack.org - all channels, all meetings, in a nice index and searchable format (i.e. google search with site:http://eavesdrop.openstack.org http://eavesdrop.openstack.org <query>) There is a reason slack has a problem with that - scaling is hard. There is also the advantage of not having silos - if I have a problem with a dependant library I can "/j #libname" and ask a question, instead of searching for what slack, or slack like tool they use, signing up, installing whatever app is needed to access it, and asking the question (and remembering what app they used, so I can keep it open for issues that run over a few days.)
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Frankly, itistoday2 is right - the fact that I have to open an external website and open the multiple pages for the days I've been away, instead of simply scrolling up and continuing the discussion, makes for a terrible experience. Detachable screen sessions make up somewhat for it, but they're still pretty limited (you might have /joined the channel only later), and it requires a personal service running, that must be attended to & etc.
pilsetnieks 11y ago
> slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services Apart from the tech problems with 1000+ sized teams, it's insane even considering the free tier with a 10'000 message limitation for 8000+ users.
- derefr 11y ago
  Our company (a three-letter megacorp) uses Slack with a 1000+-sized team just fine. However, that "team" represents our whole division; there are then hundreds of channels within it for different individual teams, prefixed with department names. Thus, no individual channel (#dept-team) has more than ~100 subscribers. Slack scales just fine when run this way. So the team size isn't itself the problem; instead, it's the idea of wanting 8000 active subscribers in the same single channel that doesn't scale. Doesn't work on Slack; doesn't work on IRC, either. At the scale of 8000 "viewers", you need the sort of specialized "presentation" software used for managing MOOC lectures and corporate shareholder calls, with fan-out servers, voting indicators, and the ability to "raise your hand" to ask the presiding officer to grant you a temporary +v.

kefka 11y ago

> IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A channel stays a channel until nobody's in it. It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. > Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Like on freenode #reprap , #3dscanning , and thousands of other topic based channels? And setting private bit is easy as a channel operator to limit who shows up. And with completely public and open protocols, anyone can make an awesome IRC client. I have one already on my phone. And there's also bots that can store and send files via http or ftp. I could also make one that saves/retrieves via Box, Dropbox, or any other storage medium trivially. Node-red makes that easy.

itistoday2 11y ago
> It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. I have actually done that, and I know it's not trivial. Few want to spend time tinkering with bots and hooking together archiving services. They want a nice Slack-type experience.
- CDRdude 11y ago
  It certainly wouldn't be trivial for me, but I can't discount kefka saying it's trivial. There are lots of developers better than I am, and their trivial tasks are my extremely difficult challenges.
  - kefka 11y ago
    I just did it :) Come to https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ room #hntesting I'm kefka, and my bot is hn_kefka_bot talk and PM, and then check the Dropbox log.
- kefka 11y ago
  Well. Words are cheap. I do appreciate CDRdude speaking up for me. Here you go. http://webchat.freenode.net http://webchat.freenode.net room #hntesting Files end up on Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ukffgmwntypfg4m/ircchatlog.txt?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ukffgmwntypfg4m/ircchatlog.txt?dl=... Searching wouldn't be too difficult. That's just loading the data up in a Hadoop and then regurgitating it. The only 'doop cluster I have now is a semi-production one. Working on getting a 150 node set up at the hackerspace. __________________________ Edit: Added time date stamps, and indication/handling for private messages to the bot. Privs now allow me to extend the functionality of the bot to do all sorts of things, like upload to MongoDB, email all logs, kick users, save to BOX, or manipulate the neopixel strip in my room.

pnathan 11y ago

> The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A well-tended IRC server has those via bots. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of > topic-focused channels wut? This is totally easy in IRC: /join #topic-channel makes the channel > private channels I'm tempted to say that a bot can provide that... but sure. > and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Not buying that, sorry, I've been happy with my mobile/desktop clients; they are relatively full-featured.

ashark 11y ago
Does your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?
- mugsie 11y ago
  yes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.
  - darklajid 11y ago
    Honest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.
    - ashark 11y ago
      I looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC. [1] http://colloquy.info http://colloquy.info [2] http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html

sirn 11y ago

> The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. At very least for the persistence part, there is a proposal to add CHATHISTORY batch type[1] to IRCv3 which should allow the server to replay chat history on join (or on request). Search is something else that probably need a little bit more work (especially for a server-side search), though. [1]: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/156 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/156