17 ms·

Why I Live in IRC (2015)

132 points by Spydar007 10y ago

lifthrasiir 10y ago
I'm a long-time IRC user (back to 2004---wait, it might not qualify as "long-time") as well, but I feel that the current reputation of IRC is simply built around communities that still conglomerate on IRC. IRC is a horrible protocol in the modern standard, lacking every bit of the modernism you define. I still don't like a recent trend of using something like the Slack instance for public discussion, but that trend clearly shows that the continued "success" of IRC is simply an illusion or at best depending on an external factor.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- adrusi 10y ago
  It's a fantastic protocol because of how simple it is. It doesn't try to bake-in features beyond the most fundamental of getting a message from one person to others. If you want want support for multiple clients you can have it, you just need to connect through a bouncer. I think some people see this as a cludge: if you can't use a piece of software effectively without additional software that's a sign that the original software is lacking. This is simply not true: what matters is how usable and reliable the end result is. It's not an argument to say that a setup being composed of multiple components makes it hard to set up, because there are ready-made solutions like IRCCloud around for people who aren't interested in doing it themselves. The fact that the setup is comprised of multiple pieces is only a testament to its versatility. You probably want a bouncer for your own usage so that you can use multiple devices and receive messages offline, but you don't need any of that for your bot running on your server, and because none of the multi-device functionality is baked into the protocol, your bot never has to worry about it. IRC lacks comprehensive presence signaling, and to the extent that this makes read receipts impossible it's a good thing. It has /away which is almost good enough, but lacks good support for being set automatically by clients. End-to-end ecnryption is becoming fashionable even on proprietary chat networks, and IRC lacks it, and that is a missing feature. The other main missing feature is federated identity, which no major network has. But apart from that IRC's only problems are where it has the same feature twice, or whan lack of cross-network standardization prevent clients from offering higher-level interfaces. Most networks support both SASL and NickServ, which have overlapping functionality. I don't think ChanServ is standardized, so clients are stuck with showing things like flags on channels and users, rather than presenting a "channel settings" menu. If ChanServ were standardized, clients could automatically configure private channels. For these few things that IRC (currently) lacks, it gives unparalleled customizability, compatability (I can connect to basically any other chat service like Facebook Messenger or Slack through IRC, but not the other way around), and respect for users' freedom (XMPP and others offer this too, but are smaller).
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  IRC is a community. The application layer has its own grammar, the way the web does. The IRC community is simply made up of different kinds of users of this community application, separated by servers and channels. The way the web is. I don't think it lacks modernism, I think it's simply a different dynamic than 'modern' alternatives. (What is "modern", btw? What "new" protocol alternatives are there? XMPP?) It could be argued the web is a far more archaic, featureless, non-modern protocol... it just has fatter clients and dynamic server-side and client-side applications.
dijit 10y ago
+1 for IRC, the interface is clunky and the protocol hasn't aged particularly well (especially for mobile devices who may not be able to hold a connection forever). But the social aspect of easily accessible chatrooms and the plethora of clients/tools surrounding IRC is really second to none. You can put a pretty skin on it (slack,discord) but at the end of the day it's going to take years to bring up the level of tooling and at the end you wind up in a closed loop on someone elses platform. FWIW; I dream of electric sheep so I'm completely biased. I run an IRC network if anyone is interested in joining. host: irc.darkscience.net/6697 (SSL required) chan: #darkscience
- josteink 10y ago
  > +1 for IRC, the interface is clunky and the protocol hasn't aged particularly well (especially for mobile devices who may not be able to hold a connection forever). Weechat and it's Android relay client is for you.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Or Glowing Bear, which also works great on iOS and the desktop (I'm one of the maintainers)
    - aaronpk 10y ago
      Glowing Bear is great! I've been using it since a few months after writing this.
- lmm 10y ago
  IRC is great for a world where people have one account on one computer that's permanently switched on, but it inherently fails to handle use from multiple devices. All "solutions" to this end up involving running your own server (or, more likely, having someone else do it) and talking to that via a probably-proprietary (or at least nonstandard) protocol at which point you no longer have the benefit you're talking about. (That protocol is often layered over an open protocol, but commands-over-ssh is very hard to interoperate with if not standardized) Good UI is not just "pretty", it's also about having commands be discoverable. Traditional IRC clients are terrible in this regard. There's no reason the platform has to be closed - I'm friends with the people working on http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/ (though not involved in it myself) and hope they succeed.
pimeys 10y ago
IRC user since 1995 and still going strong. Too bad IRCNet is declining, it has been my source of entertainment since the beginning, having these Finnish chat rooms and close circle of friends. I never really got into the english tech-related irc channels, they move too fast and are hard to follow...
jv0010 10y ago
Asl?
- penetrarthur 10y ago
  but irc is not aim
- cocotino 10y ago
  14/f/cali (^.^)/
mhd 10y ago
I know of others who forward almost everything to email, including custom scrapers/converters (and then of course there's RMS). If your info feed contains more long form resources, that seems like a better end point. But for twitter feeds and notifications, IRC seems mostly sufficient. Now I do wonder what would be the equivalent for someone heavily into image-based communiciation/updates. Unifying your reddit, snapchat, facebook, imgur etc. Forward everything to pinterest (or a similar homebrew interface)? Maybe even rendering some text updates to images...
avindroth 10y ago
I am not an IRC user, but I wonder whether Python Paradox[1] applies to IRC users. To soak wisdom from top-tier hackers in the field, you want to go where they hang out. IRC might just be the hacker playground. That alone makes a convincing case for using IRC. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
- agumonkey 10y ago
  IRC is half doers and half newbies, I started to think that projects ML are the hackers playground.
  - liviu- 10y ago
    projects ML?
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      mailing lists
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  That essay seems so wildly out of date, even though it's only a decade or so old. > And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. These days I think Python is every bit as much a corporate language as Java is, and I'm sure huge numbers of people learn it to get jobs at the conventional tech giants like Google as well as small startups.
  - thanatropism 10y ago
    Python somehow became the default language for data science, which is like the new php+mysql in terms of a high labor-intensive field attracting very new, short-term opportunity, unskilled coders.
  - nanny 10y ago
dvcrn 10y ago
This was very informative and this "hub" is something that I want to setup for myself. When I started writing down concepts I immediately picked slack because of all the integrations but isn't it a bit 'overkill' to use a community system for me alone to get all my feeds aggregated together? Are there solutions out there that offer something similar but without the community aspect?
yankcrime 10y ago
FWIW there's a really good Slack plugin for Weechat called wee-slack [0]. It uses the Slack API (as opposed to their IRC gateway) and so is surprisingly full featured. [0] https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack
- aaronpk 10y ago
  That's awesome, I'll take a look at that. Do you know if it logs to disk the same way weechat logs IRC channels? Right now I'm a little annoyed that I don't have local logs of the Slack channels I'm in.
  - AdamGibbins 10y ago
    Yes, it does - filters, logging, etc all work as they do for IRC. Huge +++ for wee-slack, has made Slack much more bearable. Supports many things Slack's own IRC protocol doesn't, like the ability to see edited messages.
- ashark 10y ago
  Do you know whether, if I run this on an always-on remote WeeChat, it will it interfere with Slack's smart notifications (smart in that it doesn't send them when I'm sitting at my laptop with the Slack client open) either by causing them not to send when they should or to be sent when they shouldn't?
VelNZ 10y ago
I've been an IRC user since 1996 and still going strong. There have been many chat networks that have come and gone, but IRC, by virtue of being a protocol rather than a commercial venture, lives on. These days, I use Textual on OS X which has a very clean interface and things like in-line images and videos combined with ZNC for logging messages while I'm away. I log in and they all come up, if I want older ones I use the backlog module with /bl #chan <num lines to go back>. Granted it's not as elegant as scrolling up in Slack but I don't tend to need it often. I'm even connected to my friend group's Slack via IRC so I never have to open Slack itself! I find the idea of piping in various things into IRC intriguing and something I've been meaning to implement. It's trivial to get a Python/Perl/etc script to connect to an IRC server and spit out some information. Long live IRC!
- rekoros 10y ago
  In case you didn't know, you can pipe A LOT of things to IRC with https://sameroom.io/integrations/irc-integrations https://sameroom.io/integrations/irc-integrations
  - rekoros 10y ago
    Albeit not all of IRC, just networks that resemble Freenode (https://sameroom.io/limitations#irc https://sameroom.io/limitations#irc)
lorenzhs 10y ago
I agree with the author on many points, but he's wrong about mobile support. WeeChat has a relay plugin (built-in) that allows mobile clients to connect to your existing WeeChat session. There are even some options to choose from: WeeChat-Android has recently gotten some love again (I hear it works nicely), and Glowing Bear works on every device that has a modern browser and has a nice responsive UI, along with some neat features like embeds and direct imgur upload. Both connect to your WeeChat instance directly, so there's no cloud provider you have to trust, as the relay works as a socket and websocket. This allows Glowing Bear to work in the browser (Disclosure: I'm one of the devs) https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android Oh and the point about long URLs being unclickable has been addressed by bare mode, which is bound to meta-L by default. This is not a concern for the mobile clients obviously, as they don't run in a terminal.
- aaronpk 10y ago
  Thanks! A few months after writing this article I actually discovered glowing-bear and have been using that now too! It's now the primary way I access weechat, both on my laptop and on my phone.
- kzisme 10y ago
  Although I don't use WeeChat - I have heard great things about Glowing Bear
dharma1 10y ago
irc since -95. Though I use it just for work these days. I don't think irc will ever go away. It would be nice to have it working in a persistent, distributed way without servers, maybe in the future.
laurent123456 10y ago
Regarding the long URL issue, since IRC can be easily customised, wouldn't it be possible to create a filter that, for each message, would send the URLs to a URL shortener service and display the result? It could even be a self-hosted service to make sure the URLs remain private.
- kzisme 10y ago
  Yeah this can easily be accomplished with a bot (and is fairly common practice)
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  There are WeeChat scripts that do exactly that (I think urlserver.py is the recommended one, but don't take my word for it). But version 1.0 (iirc) added bare display mode, which does away with the fancy decorations temporarily. This helps the terminal emulator realise that it's a multi-line URL and let you click it. See http://dev.weechat.org/post/2014/02/16/Bare-display http://dev.weechat.org/post/2014/02/16/Bare-display
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Of course it's easy to do that in a client. Also, on many channels there are bots doing that - every time someone posts a URL, a bot will reply with a shortened version of it.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    A bot creates noise for everybody - I think it's nicer to have the client handle this (urlserver.py / bare display in WeeChat, or a non-terminal client). But that creates friction for new users so maybe it's not the holy grail either.
cm3 10y ago
I never could use IRC because it's hard to sift through the noise. I have the same issue with group chats as implemented in Slack, but at least Slack can be accessed with an XMPP client, meaning I can get asynchronous delivery of messages without the need to have a client running 24/7. Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer and a bot or do they rely on a service like irccloud? Either way, without async messaging, it's hard to use in a distributed team.
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  > Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer As a heavy user of IRC, I would say yes. At least, I wouldn't be able to use it without irssi running inside tmux on some server, and everyone I know does the same. For a large Free Software project, we use Mattermost (a Slack clone with unlimited history) and it works great. There are a few features missing, but it has been a huge boost for engagement. As someone who has been using IRC for 20 years, I never thought I could get used to using a web-based client, but it's worth it. Small annoyances, such as having to educate people not to use "@channel" because it will email a notification to 300 people, but it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.
  - cm3 10y ago
    For obvious reasons I don't consider web clients a reliable solution, but it's a practical alternative when away from your desk.
    - mgbmtl 10y ago
      Considering a lot of people use Gmail for email, I would be curious as to why you consider web clients to be unreliable. (I don't use Gmail, but a ton of tech people do. Something like Mattermost is rather harmless, since less critical than email.) For what it's worth, Mattermost also package native desktop applications for Linux, Mac, Windows and iOS/Android. The desktop ones are basically a wrapper around a standalone browser. Has better native desktop notifications integration.
      - 10y ago
Raphmedia 10y ago
My main issue with IRC is channel rot. Every channels I was once a part of died. Most channels that are still "active" are in fact filled with quiet lurkers. Otherwise IRC is still my favourite. I simply don't visit anymore...
k__ 10y ago
I lived in IRC from 2001 to 2006. Back in the days it was my go to social software. People were always online there and I even started programming with mIRC. Funny thing, back in the days I built chat-bots for fun and now they are big business, haha. Well, most people there were nerds and this was okay. We also had our own small bulletin board communities. Later I wanted to meet girls and they just didn't show up often on IRC or BBoards. So I started using LiveJournal, MSN Messenger and MySpace. Later I switched to Facebook and WhatsApp.
erlehmann_ 10y ago
I use IRC over XMPP almost daily, with a transport that connects me to a channel and represents it as multi-user chat, like #maemo%irc.freenode.net@irc.netlab.cz. The primary reason is that XMPP behaves really nice if the connection is spotty: When I am using IRC in a moving train, I almost never timeout even if the network is not reachable for minutes – and as soon as the client reconnects, I get all the messages from the chatroom.
jiyinyiyong 10y ago
I started learning programming since 2012. I don't like IRC. IRC is not friendly to people like us. Hard to connect, hard to find a free and neat client, hard to talk to the people, hard to start a new thread(also hard since it's in English, but this is somehow good for others). That's why I like talking with people on Twitter and WeChat.

132 points by Spydar007 10y ago

I'm a long-time IRC user (back to 2004---wait, it might not qualify as "long-time") as well, but I feel that the current reputation of IRC is simply built around communities that still conglomerate on IRC. IRC is a horrible protocol in the modern standard, lacking every bit of the modernism you define. I still don't like a recent trend of using something like the Slack instance for public discussion, but that trend clearly shows that the continued "success" of IRC is simply an illusion or at best depending on an external factor.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
adrusi 10y ago
It's a fantastic protocol because of how simple it is. It doesn't try to bake-in features beyond the most fundamental of getting a message from one person to others. If you want want support for multiple clients you can have it, you just need to connect through a bouncer. I think some people see this as a cludge: if you can't use a piece of software effectively without additional software that's a sign that the original software is lacking. This is simply not true: what matters is how usable and reliable the end result is. It's not an argument to say that a setup being composed of multiple components makes it hard to set up, because there are ready-made solutions like IRCCloud around for people who aren't interested in doing it themselves. The fact that the setup is comprised of multiple pieces is only a testament to its versatility. You probably want a bouncer for your own usage so that you can use multiple devices and receive messages offline, but you don't need any of that for your bot running on your server, and because none of the multi-device functionality is baked into the protocol, your bot never has to worry about it. IRC lacks comprehensive presence signaling, and to the extent that this makes read receipts impossible it's a good thing. It has /away which is almost good enough, but lacks good support for being set automatically by clients. End-to-end ecnryption is becoming fashionable even on proprietary chat networks, and IRC lacks it, and that is a missing feature. The other main missing feature is federated identity, which no major network has. But apart from that IRC's only problems are where it has the same feature twice, or whan lack of cross-network standardization prevent clients from offering higher-level interfaces. Most networks support both SASL and NickServ, which have overlapping functionality. I don't think ChanServ is standardized, so clients are stuck with showing things like flags on channels and users, rather than presenting a "channel settings" menu. If ChanServ were standardized, clients could automatically configure private channels. For these few things that IRC (currently) lacks, it gives unparalleled customizability, compatability (I can connect to basically any other chat service like Facebook Messenger or Slack through IRC, but not the other way around), and respect for users' freedom (XMPP and others offer this too, but are smaller).
peterwwillis 10y ago
IRC is a community. The application layer has its own grammar, the way the web does. The IRC community is simply made up of different kinds of users of this community application, separated by servers and channels. The way the web is. I don't think it lacks modernism, I think it's simply a different dynamic than 'modern' alternatives. (What is "modern", btw? What "new" protocol alternatives are there? XMPP?) It could be argued the web is a far more archaic, featureless, non-modern protocol... it just has fatter clients and dynamic server-side and client-side applications.

dijit 10y ago

+1 for IRC, the interface is clunky and the protocol hasn't aged particularly well (especially for mobile devices who may not be able to hold a connection forever). But the social aspect of easily accessible chatrooms and the plethora of clients/tools surrounding IRC is really second to none. You can put a pretty skin on it (slack,discord) but at the end of the day it's going to take years to bring up the level of tooling and at the end you wind up in a closed loop on someone elses platform. FWIW; I dream of electric sheep so I'm completely biased. I run an IRC network if anyone is interested in joining. host: irc.darkscience.net/6697 (SSL required) chan: #darkscience

josteink 10y ago
> +1 for IRC, the interface is clunky and the protocol hasn't aged particularly well (especially for mobile devices who may not be able to hold a connection forever). Weechat and it's Android relay client is for you.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Or Glowing Bear, which also works great on iOS and the desktop (I'm one of the maintainers)
  - aaronpk 10y ago
    Glowing Bear is great! I've been using it since a few months after writing this.
lmm 10y ago
IRC is great for a world where people have one account on one computer that's permanently switched on, but it inherently fails to handle use from multiple devices. All "solutions" to this end up involving running your own server (or, more likely, having someone else do it) and talking to that via a probably-proprietary (or at least nonstandard) protocol at which point you no longer have the benefit you're talking about. (That protocol is often layered over an open protocol, but commands-over-ssh is very hard to interoperate with if not standardized) Good UI is not just "pretty", it's also about having commands be discoverable. Traditional IRC clients are terrible in this regard. There's no reason the platform has to be closed - I'm friends with the people working on http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/ (though not involved in it myself) and hope they succeed.

pimeys 10y ago

IRC user since 1995 and still going strong. Too bad IRCNet is declining, it has been my source of entertainment since the beginning, having these Finnish chat rooms and close circle of friends. I never really got into the english tech-related irc channels, they move too fast and are hard to follow...

jv0010 10y ago

Asl?

penetrarthur 10y ago
but irc is not aim
cocotino 10y ago
14/f/cali (^.^)/

mhd 10y ago

I know of others who forward almost everything to email, including custom scrapers/converters (and then of course there's RMS). If your info feed contains more long form resources, that seems like a better end point. But for twitter feeds and notifications, IRC seems mostly sufficient. Now I do wonder what would be the equivalent for someone heavily into image-based communiciation/updates. Unifying your reddit, snapchat, facebook, imgur etc. Forward everything to pinterest (or a similar homebrew interface)? Maybe even rendering some text updates to images...

avindroth 10y ago

I am not an IRC user, but I wonder whether Python Paradox[1] applies to IRC users. To soak wisdom from top-tier hackers in the field, you want to go where they hang out. IRC might just be the hacker playground. That alone makes a convincing case for using IRC. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

agumonkey 10y ago
IRC is half doers and half newbies, I started to think that projects ML are the hackers playground.
- liviu- 10y ago
  projects ML?
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    mailing lists
chrisseaton 10y ago
That essay seems so wildly out of date, even though it's only a decade or so old. > And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. These days I think Python is every bit as much a corporate language as Java is, and I'm sure huge numbers of people learn it to get jobs at the conventional tech giants like Google as well as small startups.
- thanatropism 10y ago
  Python somehow became the default language for data science, which is like the new php+mysql in terms of a high labor-intensive field attracting very new, short-term opportunity, unskilled coders.
- nanny 10y ago

dvcrn 10y ago

This was very informative and this "hub" is something that I want to setup for myself. When I started writing down concepts I immediately picked slack because of all the integrations but isn't it a bit 'overkill' to use a community system for me alone to get all my feeds aggregated together? Are there solutions out there that offer something similar but without the community aspect?

yankcrime 10y ago

FWIW there's a really good Slack plugin for Weechat called wee-slack [0]. It uses the Slack API (as opposed to their IRC gateway) and so is surprisingly full featured. [0] https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack

aaronpk 10y ago
That's awesome, I'll take a look at that. Do you know if it logs to disk the same way weechat logs IRC channels? Right now I'm a little annoyed that I don't have local logs of the Slack channels I'm in.
- AdamGibbins 10y ago
  Yes, it does - filters, logging, etc all work as they do for IRC. Huge +++ for wee-slack, has made Slack much more bearable. Supports many things Slack's own IRC protocol doesn't, like the ability to see edited messages.
ashark 10y ago
Do you know whether, if I run this on an always-on remote WeeChat, it will it interfere with Slack's smart notifications (smart in that it doesn't send them when I'm sitting at my laptop with the Slack client open) either by causing them not to send when they should or to be sent when they shouldn't?

VelNZ 10y ago

I've been an IRC user since 1996 and still going strong. There have been many chat networks that have come and gone, but IRC, by virtue of being a protocol rather than a commercial venture, lives on. These days, I use Textual on OS X which has a very clean interface and things like in-line images and videos combined with ZNC for logging messages while I'm away. I log in and they all come up, if I want older ones I use the backlog module with /bl #chan <num lines to go back>. Granted it's not as elegant as scrolling up in Slack but I don't tend to need it often. I'm even connected to my friend group's Slack via IRC so I never have to open Slack itself! I find the idea of piping in various things into IRC intriguing and something I've been meaning to implement. It's trivial to get a Python/Perl/etc script to connect to an IRC server and spit out some information. Long live IRC!

rekoros 10y ago
In case you didn't know, you can pipe A LOT of things to IRC with https://sameroom.io/integrations/irc-integrations https://sameroom.io/integrations/irc-integrations
- rekoros 10y ago
  Albeit not all of IRC, just networks that resemble Freenode (https://sameroom.io/limitations#irc https://sameroom.io/limitations#irc)

lorenzhs 10y ago

I agree with the author on many points, but he's wrong about mobile support. WeeChat has a relay plugin (built-in) that allows mobile clients to connect to your existing WeeChat session. There are even some options to choose from: WeeChat-Android has recently gotten some love again (I hear it works nicely), and Glowing Bear works on every device that has a modern browser and has a nice responsive UI, along with some neat features like embeds and direct imgur upload. Both connect to your WeeChat instance directly, so there's no cloud provider you have to trust, as the relay works as a socket and websocket. This allows Glowing Bear to work in the browser (Disclosure: I'm one of the devs) https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android Oh and the point about long URLs being unclickable has been addressed by bare mode, which is bound to meta-L by default. This is not a concern for the mobile clients obviously, as they don't run in a terminal.

aaronpk 10y ago
Thanks! A few months after writing this article I actually discovered glowing-bear and have been using that now too! It's now the primary way I access weechat, both on my laptop and on my phone.
kzisme 10y ago
Although I don't use WeeChat - I have heard great things about Glowing Bear

dharma1 10y ago

irc since -95. Though I use it just for work these days. I don't think irc will ever go away. It would be nice to have it working in a persistent, distributed way without servers, maybe in the future.

laurent123456 10y ago

Regarding the long URL issue, since IRC can be easily customised, wouldn't it be possible to create a filter that, for each message, would send the URLs to a URL shortener service and display the result? It could even be a self-hosted service to make sure the URLs remain private.

kzisme 10y ago
Yeah this can easily be accomplished with a bot (and is fairly common practice)
lorenzhs 10y ago
There are WeeChat scripts that do exactly that (I think urlserver.py is the recommended one, but don't take my word for it). But version 1.0 (iirc) added bare display mode, which does away with the fancy decorations temporarily. This helps the terminal emulator realise that it's a multi-line URL and let you click it. See http://dev.weechat.org/post/2014/02/16/Bare-display http://dev.weechat.org/post/2014/02/16/Bare-display
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Of course it's easy to do that in a client. Also, on many channels there are bots doing that - every time someone posts a URL, a bot will reply with a shortened version of it.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  A bot creates noise for everybody - I think it's nicer to have the client handle this (urlserver.py / bare display in WeeChat, or a non-terminal client). But that creates friction for new users so maybe it's not the holy grail either.

cm3 10y ago

I never could use IRC because it's hard to sift through the noise. I have the same issue with group chats as implemented in Slack, but at least Slack can be accessed with an XMPP client, meaning I can get asynchronous delivery of messages without the need to have a client running 24/7. Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer and a bot or do they rely on a service like irccloud? Either way, without async messaging, it's hard to use in a distributed team.

mgbmtl 10y ago
> Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer As a heavy user of IRC, I would say yes. At least, I wouldn't be able to use it without irssi running inside tmux on some server, and everyone I know does the same. For a large Free Software project, we use Mattermost (a Slack clone with unlimited history) and it works great. There are a few features missing, but it has been a huge boost for engagement. As someone who has been using IRC for 20 years, I never thought I could get used to using a web-based client, but it's worth it. Small annoyances, such as having to educate people not to use "@channel" because it will email a notification to 300 people, but it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.
- cm3 10y ago
  For obvious reasons I don't consider web clients a reliable solution, but it's a practical alternative when away from your desk.
  - mgbmtl 10y ago
    Considering a lot of people use Gmail for email, I would be curious as to why you consider web clients to be unreliable. (I don't use Gmail, but a ton of tech people do. Something like Mattermost is rather harmless, since less critical than email.) For what it's worth, Mattermost also package native desktop applications for Linux, Mac, Windows and iOS/Android. The desktop ones are basically a wrapper around a standalone browser. Has better native desktop notifications integration.
    - 10y ago

Raphmedia 10y ago

My main issue with IRC is channel rot. Every channels I was once a part of died. Most channels that are still "active" are in fact filled with quiet lurkers. Otherwise IRC is still my favourite. I simply don't visit anymore...

k__ 10y ago

I lived in IRC from 2001 to 2006. Back in the days it was my go to social software. People were always online there and I even started programming with mIRC. Funny thing, back in the days I built chat-bots for fun and now they are big business, haha. Well, most people there were nerds and this was okay. We also had our own small bulletin board communities. Later I wanted to meet girls and they just didn't show up often on IRC or BBoards. So I started using LiveJournal, MSN Messenger and MySpace. Later I switched to Facebook and WhatsApp.

erlehmann_ 10y ago

I use IRC over XMPP almost daily, with a transport that connects me to a channel and represents it as multi-user chat, like #maemo%irc.freenode.net@irc.netlab.cz. The primary reason is that XMPP behaves really nice if the connection is spotty: When I am using IRC in a moving train, I almost never timeout even if the network is not reachable for minutes – and as soon as the client reconnects, I get all the messages from the chatroom.

jiyinyiyong 10y ago

I started learning programming since 2012. I don't like IRC. IRC is not friendly to people like us. Hard to connect, hard to find a free and neat client, hard to talk to the people, hard to start a new thread(also hard since it's in English, but this is somehow good for others). That's why I like talking with people on Twitter and WeChat.