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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 fea
by 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 agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoWell. 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.
- Killswitch 11y agoLet me know how I can do that just by signing up, because my my job is to work on company problems, not emulate Slack in IRC all day long. No matter how much you push and say that everything Slack offers is doable in IRC, doesn't change the fact that you still have to go through the troubles of setting that stuff up. While I agree that setting up a bot isn't hard, I've done it for the IRC channel I created and still sit in daily, but fact of the matter is Slack is a matter of signing up and enabling a couple of features. My job for my company is to build our product, not an internal chat tool. That's what Slack is for.
- kefka 11y agoOh please. The tools I use rapidly allow me to chain all sorts of stuff together to create things that surpass even Slack and other apps. Where is a Slack that can do "sensitivity calculation" to alert users of possibly hostile tone? That's right. Not created yet. Give me a half hour and I could have the beginning of that. I also could get translation facilities built in so that English/French/German/Spanish could be seamlessly translatable. The sky's the limit. And your negativity diminishes your ideas.
- Killswitch 11y ago