23 ms·

IRC v3

595 points by bpierre 10y ago

JshWright 10y ago
I am a long time IRC user (irssi is my 'daily driver'), but I'm pretty sure IRCv3 is called "Slack".
- scrollaway 10y ago
  God no. Please no. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300687
- vesinisa 10y ago
  Hooray for centralised, proprietary tools controlled by a single corporation! /s Seriously though, I think this is exactly what is needed for IRC: a facelift. IRC is hugely superior to centralised tools like Slack for obvious reasons. But if people are moving to Slack it's not enough to say they should not do that, but try to actually offer a competitive user experience.
  - uola 10y ago
    I can't say it's bad to update the IRC protocol, but I don't think it would make much difference either. What people don't realize with "decentralized" services is that they don't have a good ecosystem anymore. The web stack, which favors centralization, ships with usable encryption, user interface, distribution etc. To achieve similar end results with "conventional" stacks you will spend far more effort with far less developers to choose from. People tend to dismiss web application development for being careless, but at the same time forget that this is what made these clear text fairly rudimentary protocols popular. Until we get encryption built-in, more robust programming languages and figure out distribution on the desktop it's unlikely that the ecosystem will come back.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    If people are moving to other tools, you really can't say IRC is "superior for obvious reasons"
- wingless 10y ago
  Eugh. You could at least choose an open standard like Matrix. http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/
  - op00to 10y ago
    Why?
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      To answer that question for yourself just requires reflecting on the benefits of open source vs. proprietary software. Also, in this particular case, Matrix also appears to be a well thought out platform for decentralised communication, one that is likely to be flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple different forms of communication.
  - Kudos 10y ago
    I hadn't heard of this. I just spent the last hour setting up my own federated server and playing with some clients. This is pretty great! A lot like Slack in terms of UX, but without the corporate walled garden.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I don't get this. Slack was made for small to medium teams. There's so many Slack chats are that unbearably slow (or expensive) because it can't handle that many users. Also, I have to get invited, check my email, sign up, and skip the tutorial every time?
- hueving 10y ago
  It's sad to me that open source projects so quickly reach for proprietary workflow tools like github and slack. There was a time when you would be laughed out of the room for suggesting that open source developers hinge a project on proprietary stuff. Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool.
  - slgeorge 10y ago
    > Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies > that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool. I think it's more that originally FOSS developers/users were hard-core's who were into the tech and the ideology of 'Free Software'. The user-base now has many people who are into 'open source' for the collaborative (group motivation) and perceived technical benefits at an infrastructure level. It's a benefit because there's more 'free' code flowing around, but the downside is that as soon as a proprietary thing is better the user-base moves to it - they have no link with ideology, they're linked to utility.
- JshWright 10y ago
  I'm realizing an emoticon might have helped clarity here... ;)
vesinisa 10y ago
Interesting development. Apart from the original IRC specification published in 1993 and revised in 2000 (supposedly the namesake of "IRC v3") there has been quite little real standardisation work in IRC protocol, with various clients, servers and platforms each implementing their custom extensions.
- danieloaks 10y ago
  Standardisation is weird in IRC. From what I've seen, most of it that has happened has been the result of one group implementing their custom command/extension and then a bunch of other vendors implementing it in the same way (as well as all the interesting politics behind it all). There's a surprising amount that's been mostly-standardised over time, and not just from formal standards groups like the IETF or IRCv3. Related, I've been working on these sites for a while which I hope can be useful: http://defs.ircdocs.horse/ http://defs.ircdocs.horse/ http://modern.ircdocs.horse/ http://modern.ircdocs.horse/ Still, it's been really interesting to get into. It's nice seeing how things have gone so far and how they're going forward (and digging into the archives is always fun).
rwmj 10y ago
IRC (current version) works fine for me. The trick is to front it with ZNC or similar software. Anyway, why isn't this being done through the IETF?
- daenney 10y ago
  What's the advantages by doing it through the IETF? > IRC (current version) works fine for me. The trick is to front it with ZNC or similar software. But ZNC actually uses a bunch of IRCv3 features.
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    You see that computer in front of you with its internet connection? All the things you don't think about, and most of the ones you do, work together the way they do because of the IETF. You see those other things that don't work together? Those are the ones the IETF didn't do.
    - daenney 10y ago
      I am more than well aware what the IETF is and what it has done. However, your response providers absolutely no answer to my question and is quite frankly patronising and rude. I asked why this should be done under the IETF? What are the benefits, specific to the IRC protocol, of doing this under the banner of the IETF versus not? What do you believe will be gained by doing this under the IETF? There's plenty of protocols and technologies that we use today that don't fall under the IETF banner and are plenty successful. The W3C is an organisation that comes to mind for example.
- op00to 10y ago
  For you. What about the millions of nontechnical people that need an open communication platform? We use IRC at my employer, and the complexity of getting a bouncer set up means that for cross time zone teams, most people miss any conversations that don't happen in their business hours. This has huge effects on collaboration.
nocarrier 10y ago
Why isn't encryption baked in by default? It's optional from what I can tell. I don't know how you can design a new protocol and not include encryption.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Exactly what I wanted to say. Why even bother if encryption is not included by default in the new protocol?
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    Encryption is not a panacea. It's not a magic button that makes everything it touches "Secure!".
    - nocarrier 10y ago
      Indeed, but there is something to be said for sane defaults--look at the thread on HN a few weeks ago about SSH cipher defaults. Yes, TLS and the CA ecosystem has its faults, but my stance is that any chat protocol should be using auth and encryption, especially group chat protocols like IRC. I'm less upset now after seeing that the proposed spec for IRC 3.3 includes something similar to HSTS.
- daenney 10y ago
  > The IRCv3 Working Group is a collection of IRC client and server software authors working to enhance, maintain and standardize the IRC protocol using backwards-compatible extensions. It's not a new protocol.
  - nocarrier 10y ago
    Fair enough, but I feel you're being a little pedantic since there are base extensions described which are required, and optional extensions which are not required. TLS is one of the optional extensions. So I'll reframe my question and ask: Why isn't TLS a base extension?
jbk 10y ago
That's a great idea. Maybe also backport some features of Slack, like edition of messages (with a flag marking it as edited), or a common way to have plugins/extensions, or tagging links as images.
- daenney 10y ago
  > like edition of messages (with a flag marking it as edited) This works on Slack but only with their client. Use one of the bridges and you have no clue what's going on and they have a centralised system for this. Syncing that somehow across all servers in an IRC network, across netsplits and everything, is far from simple. You'd also need to do this retroactively somehow if a client received a message, disconnects, the message is updated and the client then reconnects, in order to present an accurate history. > or a common way to have plugins/extensions IRC already has a way to allow for extensions. Or do you mean client side? > or tagging links as images I'm not sure the IRC protocol should care about that at all. It's more up to the client to detect image links and Glowing Bear for example already does and can display them inline.
  - jbk 10y ago
    > Syncing that somehow across all servers in an IRC network, across netsplits and everything, is far from simple. Yes, it's not simple. But it's not impossible to do. And yes, it might not work in 100% of cases, after netsplits, but so what?
    - daenney 10y ago
      That matters a lot. Inconsistent history is a problem and leads to all kinds of communication issues and misunderstandings. You said you agreed on A No I edited it later to say that I meant I was in favour of B Oh, I never saw that edit...
      - jbk 10y ago
        That's exactly the same on Slack, and people like it.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
I second a comment made below regarding https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/. I've used IRC for years and still use it almost daily - but come on Mosh + tmux + ec2 just to have permanent chat history? I seriously can't advocate this crap to anyone in 2016. It's too little, too late.
- Gruselbauer 10y ago
  Well, yeah. When I was a teenager my group of friends used to use a QNet IRC chat for communications. Most on mIRC and such clients. Today it's pretty much all nerds. I do enjoy IRC, and pretty much live inside my tmux session, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it.
  - Dowwie 10y ago
    Let me get this straight... you keep IRC running all day but you wouldn't recommend it to others because it's all nerds?
    - Gruselbauer 10y ago
      > but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, who were hard enough to get off WhatsApp and into Telegram at least. To my parents, who have trouble enough running Skype. To the girlfriend, who's happy with Snapchat. IRC, even at the very basic level with a GUI or Web client, demands things from users I don't consider realistic to expect from them. I'm very happy with it the way it is though. Just saying that I won't waste time recommending Arch Linux as a desktop OS to friends who have trouble keeping a Windows install useable for six months.
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        You have to take it step by step. Otherwise people keep in their backward systems or habits forever.
  - 10y ago
prawnsalad 10y ago
There's a lot of neat stuff in IRCv3 to bring IRC up to date, but most importantly it is standardising a lot of the existing protocol and patching up some of the existing warts that make pushing IRC difficult - all while being backwards compatible. Developing kiwiirc.com over the past few years to cover many different IRC servers in all different languages and using many different services/auth services has been a real pain. It won't improve overnight but these IRCv3 extensions making their way into many different IRC server projects are really helping to smooth things out. There is currently a re-write of the Kiwi IRC project to experiment and make use of the entire IRCv3 extension set, along with some other features to make web based IRC clients just as friendly and modern as people expect from messaging applications today. This will be a huge boost to the millions of people using IRC via Kiwi IRC. IRC is getting interesting again and IRCv3 is up there making a lot of this possible.
- lovesIRC 10y ago
  I use KiwiIRC each and everyday. It's one of the nicest looking and easiest to setup web frontend for my hybrid-ircd setup. Sadly it's just a small group of friends and an OLD eggdrop bot that runs a crusty old megahal.mod as entertainment. I haven't found anything that runs as well and can create humerous replies since then. Hopefully the old code will continue to compile for awhile. Anyway, I strayed off topic. I too am excited for IRCv3 and the future of IRC. I love the protocol, and despite it's drawbacks it serves my purpose well. And thank you for all your work on KiwiIRC. I love the project :)
  - stryk 10y ago
    Bit off-topic, but Eggdrop was the very first thing I ever compiled from source WAY back in the later 1990's. I figured out how to hack together a (absolutely terrible) TCL script to monitor #fatefiles on EFNet for messages by certain nicks (a few XDCC bots) and echo them to another private channel. It was trash but it worked. One of my earliest experiences that I can remember with any sort of real code. Ahhhh, the good 'ol days.... great times. :-)
    - 10y ago
tarancato 10y ago
I don't feel like typing much because it's nap time but IRCv3 is an almost closed group of friends, mostly znc core developers, who have decided they can choose what the future of IRC looks like. They have put lots of pressure on and harassed other developers of clients and networks, sending them patches and infiltrating their devs if necessary, so their ideas are actually implemented. If you complain about those ideas and specs, they'll tell you to refer to their github issue tracker, but they mostly ignore those who are not part of that core group I mentioned.
- prawnsalad 10y ago
  While a number of people in the group are friends, I definitely wouldn't call it a closed group of friends. These are people that have been developing different IRC projects for many years, all discussing the protocol and making sure clients + servers actually work together. Friendships will come from this over years. A lot of the core group all work on different competing projects, servers and clients, and do frequently discuss any proposal made by anyone if it makes sense.
- donatj 10y ago
  I have seen exactly this happening on an IRC library I use for a bot.
  - daenney 10y ago
    Where, when, how? You should provide some evidence to support such a claim or accusation.
- perlgeek 10y ago
  Sending patches to implement proposed protocol enhancements sounds like a pretty nice thing to do.
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    That assumes everyone agrees that they really are enhancements.
paradite 10y ago
Looking at homepages of various IRC clients, I feel like I am back to 5 years ago when jQuery UI is still a thing: http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html Equally out-of-date are the screenshots of the clients on the homepages. I don't think I will ever see an IRC desktop or web client that has decent UI according to today's standard. Then again probably I am too young to be their target audience. Edit: Okay there are some IRC clients that actually look good, such as Riot, but not on the list of IRCv3 client.
- prawnsalad 10y ago
  If you're a designer yourself we could do with some design help on the Kiwi IRC project! It's one of the largest web based IRC clients and currently getting a rewrite at the moment, but we've always had a lack of design input unfortunately.
  - paradite 10y ago
    Nah, I am not good at designing either. "Borrowing" from Slack is probably the way to go since people seem to like that. Btw, your file upload button at bottom right seems to be not working, it says "Application AisMDMMInTAOji478kuNxz is unavailable." when I click on it.
- xPaw 10y ago
  Try taking a look at The Lounge, it aims to be rather modern. https://thelounge.github.io https://thelounge.github.io
  - derkha 10y ago
    Nice, this may make me finally move on from irssi
- okket 10y ago
  Have a look at Textual (macOS): https://www.codeux.com/textual/ https://www.codeux.com/textual/
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I'm not sure if this is the best approach. Matrix might be a better way to go, at least for some things. If you really want persistent history and persistent identity, I'm not sure why you bother with IRC at this point: both will always be second class there. Try XMPP, Matrix, Psyc, or whatever. Just so long as you can convince your friends to use it...
- caf 10y ago
  On IRC, your "persistent identity" was your user@hostname (and your nick is ephemeral). That's why the user@hostname is shown when a client joins a channel, or in WHO or WHOIS - and why bans match on nick!user@host. This worked great when people were typically using IRC from their login on a server at their university (and this is also originally why IRC servers used the 'ident' protocol when you connect - to stop you spoofing other users on the same shared system). It stopped being a viable persistent identity for all users when the @hostname part stopped being persistent - when people started gettting dynamically assigned addresses on internet connections at home.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    ...Exactly.
Jizzle 10y ago
In many ways, the idea of IRC chat has grown significantly beyond the conventional client. From the ubiquity of chat for productivity in applications like HipChat to the hugely successful Twitch.tv platform, IRC has proven to be a viable backbone in these scenarios. It's quite nice then to see a concerted standardization effort. Hopefully, many of the proprietary features we might recognize today will be widespread and freely available in the future.
meira 10y ago
Is IRC v3 better than XMPP? There are any ircd as good as ejabberd?
c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y ago
My favourite bit is how they skipped adding length negotiation and it is causing them problems already. See the brief discussion of size limit on http://ircv3.net/specs/core/message-tags-3.2.html http://ircv3.net/specs/core/message-tags-3.2.html Adding tags forced them to increase message length because of how IRC messages are hilariously limited to 512 bytes in all directions. In the existing protocol you already have to guess how long your messages are allowed to be because the server tacks on a prefix to your message before relaying it, which can require it to truncate characters to fit the modified message into the length limit. Having some amount of tags tacked on as well would have made it impossible to guess how much room you had. Now if they had started with fixing the actual protocol they wouldn't have had to deal with that. Honestly this feels more like a standard "let's add cool stuff" push than intelligent stewardship of the protocol. I guess that is kind of cool too though.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Length negotiation has been discussed for years, but it’s not that easy. Imagine user A negotiates a length fo 1024 bytes with the server, user B negotiates a length of 2048 bytes. User B sends a message via the server to user A. What happens?
  - c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y ago
    No, it isn't easy but that is what makes it the kind of thing that requires great spec work to accomplish. It would require proposing transitional steps and monitoring their adoption over a very long timeline. However reading their site more carefully I suppose their stated goal technically is to only provide extensions to the protocol. So the situation you describe already happens, user A has 512 bytes to send to the server, but the server has 512-prefix_length bytes to send to B. This is a flaw in the original protocol and the currently accepted solution is to truncate server-side(what to do is not stated explicitly, though it is implied that you probably shouldn't wrap messages). But fixing it is probably out of scope.
    - caf 10y ago
singularity2001 10y ago
same for voice would be nice. webrtc seems to fail as skype replacement (so far, in our network)
jwr 10y ago
I am very glad this is happening. IRC was one of the first applications I started using on the internet. These days it nearly disappeared because of closed silos like Facebook, Twitter and Slack. This effort could help bring back a decentralized service that is not under the control of any single company.
- uxcn 10y ago
  I'm a huge fan of the IRC protocol, and I think I've set up IRC channels at nearly every company I've worked for. Freenode and Weechat seem to support the changes, but I honestly worry that the protocol ends up more complicated than it needs to be, or possibly more complicated than people can use. Diaspora already provides a lot of what IRCv3 looks like it's trying to do. I guess I'm just not sure what the difference is.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  That's the sad thing about decentralized services, they follow a standard that doesn't get updated. Facebook and slack can add new features every month, but adding a new feature to email or IRC is so difficult.
  - uxcn 10y ago
    Okay... I agree adding features to email and IRC are probably not the easiest things in the world. There are a number of useful features that have been added to email over time though, and I don't think decentralized control of the protocol is the bottleneck. Wave might or might not be a good example.
tete 10y ago
Apologies for being off topic. I am happy about this story now being on the front page. However, I don't really understand how reposts work. I always thought that URLs are a unique key. Is this a way to kind of "retry" them? In this case I'd be curious about how they work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12570201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12570201
- wtbob 10y ago
  I've had the same thing happen with a few of my submissions. On the one hand: cool, the story I liked is now being seen. But OTOH: not so cool, I like the HN metagame too.
- Cogito 10y ago
  Essentially, as I understand it, if multiple people submit the same exact URL in a short period of time, they count as votes on the first submission (this may well be completely wrong, but that is how I believe it works). After a period of time, new submissions are their own post, to allow submissions that did not get visibility have a chance at being seen. This is also sometimes done manually by the mods if they see something particularly interesting that was missed (not sure about the last point though again, I believe it to be true).
rachelbythebay 10y ago
It's still a graph with single points of failure throughout, right?
- danieloaks 10y ago
  For now, yeah. Devs from various servers are experimenting with alternate s2s protocols aiming to solve this though.
- Senji 10y ago
  An irc network can have several servers. If one goes down if the others are online you can connect to any one of them and still be ok. A net split will happen but they tend to resolve fast.
k__ 10y ago
I used IRC for over 10 years, but after using Slack for 1 it just felt outdated to me. Offline messages and simulatnous logins from multiple places are just two features I was missing in IRC and didn't even know till I had them, haha. But yeah, IRC networks just worked as message broker and not as databases, so I never thought about it.
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  I use ZNC, so logging in from multiple places works well.
  - agentdrtran 10y ago
    But now you have to run a ZNC server as well - it's a lot more work for a very simple feature.
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      WeeChat + relay clients can do it as well, you only run weechat in a tmux/screen somwhere and connect to it with a relay client (Glowing Bear or WeeChat-Android). Works nicely, with synced state and arbitrary history scrollback
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It's not "very simple" - it's just that with Slack, someone else is running ZNC for you. Chat apps don't magically "just work" - either you run your own infrastructure, or use someone else's.
      - CJefferson 10y ago
        Even with IRC you are still using someone else' infrastructure -- unless you run your own IRC network from scratch of course.
        nucleardog 10y ago
lucb1e 10y ago
They've been working on this for years and I'm seeing very little of it. And beyond that, it's missing everything we take for granted nowadays: scrollback, keeping note of where you were and media sharing. Yeah media sharing can be done with, what's it called, CTCP? That's just piping stuff through a short message service, like Twitter or DNS. It doesn't properly display media either, but it allows for small file transfers. And of course scrollback can be done with bouncers. But it's not something I see my mother using. Facebook Messenger is what I see my mother using. Is there anything new on the website, or it it just being linked again?
- wcummings 10y ago
  The ircv3 server-time extension can be used to implement scrollback intelligently, there's a ZNC plugin which does this.
drcross 10y ago
I run an XMPP server for myself and a few friend and have had no end to the trouble with it getting OTR or any level of encryption working reliably before friends lose their interest. Please, someone, just offer us an open source slack clone that runs off on a R-pi and has a walk through wizard to enable the 99% of typical install requirements. Even as someone who works in the industry, I dont have time to learn the bells and whistles that running a chat server requires.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Which problems did you run into? I use Prosody as the server (which is brain-dead simple to set up) and Conversations as the client on my friends' Android phones. We just add each others as buddies and set "OTR only" with two taps, and these problems are solved forever. I do agree though that the user experience for my OTR-enabled messengers is shit (especially the "first message not encrypted" problem).
- upofadown 10y ago
  If you are running your own server why would you need OTR? Normally connections to a single server are all TLS and work transparently.
- aw3c2 10y ago
  https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.RaspberryPi https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.RaspberryPi
- c3833174 10y ago
  Retroshare?
- RandomlyGen 10y ago
  Have you tried rocket.chat?
znpy 10y ago
I know I'll be dowvoted to oblivion but I'll say it anyway... You advocate for privacy, You advocate for openness, You advocate for transparency, You advocate for interoperability, You advocate for host-it-yourself, You advocate for customisability, You advocate for scriptability ... But then all of a sudden "oh no IRC, not enough colours, geez, running a bouncer, who wants to do it?" ------- I'd design irc-v3 to be bouncer-friendly, and maybe to integrate some bouncer-y features into IRC servers as well (most IRC servers keep logs anyway)
- kbuck 10y ago
  > (most IRC servers keep logs anyway) IRCd developer and network staff member here. Dead wrong. I don't think I've seen a single IRCd that keeps logs, and doing so would make it much more expensive to run an IRC network. Additionally, it would be a huge violation of privacy, and we value our users' privacy. The IRCd only logs server events (e.g. network-wide bans, server connection/disconnection, use of administrative tools) and user connections/disconnections (for anti-abuse purposes). If network staff have logs of something, it was either because their IRC client was present in the channel or because someone else gave them logs. Most of my network's servers hang around 2-3% CPU usage and <5GB disk usage, and we'd like to keep it that way because we don't want it to cost a lot to host. We have an average of 1000-2000 users per server.
grizzles 10y ago
To fix irc, the best thing they could do would be to add first class support for js and websockets.
- majewsky 10y ago
  I literally can't tell if this is satire.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    Me neither. I hope it is, but … I just don't know any more.
  - grizzles 10y ago
    It's not, but your comment made me smile. You seem to feel differently. Go ahead, tell me why it shouldn't be the case.
    - charonn0 10y ago
      I'm not the person you asked, but I share their opinion because JS and websockets do not appear to have any obvious relationship or applicability to IRC.
      - grizzles 10y ago
        A reason to do it is because most internet users >99.9% have a web browser. <0.01% have an irc client. You could argue that Twitter or Slack has sort of filled this niche for people who want to do #topic based chat but if the goal is to do it in an open protocol, then that's imo why it would be applicable to irc.
        majewsky 10y ago
        Okay, but in which way is JS and WebSockets relevant to the IRC core protocol, if you usually have a proxy (such as KiwiIRC) which speaks IRC in the backend and HTTP/JS/websockets/whatever in the frontend.
jezfromfuture 10y ago
Who are these bunch of no Marks and why are they telling us what irc needs to be , signed the users of irc since the 80's
bborud 10y ago
I ran an IRCnet server for 15 years or so and when the PSU crapped out I decided 15 years would be enough. If I were to give one piece of advice: forget IRC. If you want to make a free, large scale chat system, just forget you ever saw IRC. There are no solutions in that neighborhood.
unixhero 10y ago
Unrealircd is imcredible, as far as irc servers go. I ran it with 300 concurrent users at a local LAN and was able to do a lot of excitimg things like load balancing between servers other cool things, already back in 2001.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
threatworking 10y ago
is there any place online where people hang out like irc used to be in the 2000s era? i've been looking for so long and desperately need to idle and /slap people around with a large trout ..asking for a friend..
Iggyhopper 10y ago
Apps like Discord are the new IRC.
- PostOnce 10y ago
  IRC is a protocol. Discord is a business. NNTP/usenet is a protocol. Reddit is a business. Email is a protocol. Facebook is a business. Protocols don't go bankrupt and close up shop. They'll still be around in 10 years. Protocols don't magically pull the rug out from under you, dictate how you use them, or suddenly change features you want and need without you having any ability to remain on the old system. They don't suddenly up the system requirements or discontinue support for old clients. I can still email from any device I ever could, palm pilot, powermac, whatever. Meanwhile your favorite app is dropping support for Android 4 or whatever 24months after release. Or app xyz no longer works on a 2 year old iOS. Protocols are something I can rely on. Businesses fly by night. I'm not going to start using Discord now and have it be gone this time next year, I've been using IRC for decades, and I'm going to keep using it. It works perfectly, everywhere. Especially if I have mosh and a server running my irc client somewhere else.
pmarreck 10y ago
I still use irccloud.com. Fave feature is preserving history so I can drop right into a conversation.
T3RMINATED 10y ago
Someone tell these IRC folks about Facebook Messenger.
jfe 10y ago
Do a substantial number of IRC users actually care that the current version of IRC lacks the features that IRCv3 proposes, or are we just modernizing because we want to make writing IRC bots more complicated?
- SaberUK 10y ago
  IRCv3 makes writing software easier not more complicated. Take the "away-notify" extension for example. Without it you would have to repeatedly poll a channel with WHO to see if all users in that channel have marked themselves as away.
kodisha 10y ago
We, small gaming community were using IRC as matchmaking "service" where we would all add to a queue, and the bot would then create teams based on players ranking. That worked quite nice, for ~15 years, and whole community was created, things worked quite nice, diehard users used BNC and terminals, but lately everyone is switching to Discord. Main matchmaking is still on IRC, but other sub-groups migrated to discord long ago, and that scares me, because no one at the moment knows what will happen with Discord year or two from now.
anindha 10y ago
From https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html/ https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html/ "IRCv3 exists and is addressing some of these issues; this is great news and we wish them well. It’s almost a contradiction in terms to get competitive between openly interoperable communication projects - we look forward to increasing the richness of Matrix<->IRC bridges as the project progresses." Why not merge the two projects or just focus on one? WebRTC seems to be a better protocol right now.
jrnichols 10y ago
I wish that there was just a solid way to prevent DDoS attacks and netsplits. IRC has always been one of my favorite communication mediums.
tofupup 10y ago
neat

IRC v3

595 points by bpierre 10y ago

JshWright 10y ago

I am a long time IRC user (irssi is my 'daily driver'), but I'm pretty sure IRCv3 is called "Slack".

scrollaway 10y ago
God no. Please no. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300687
vesinisa 10y ago
Hooray for centralised, proprietary tools controlled by a single corporation! /s Seriously though, I think this is exactly what is needed for IRC: a facelift. IRC is hugely superior to centralised tools like Slack for obvious reasons. But if people are moving to Slack it's not enough to say they should not do that, but try to actually offer a competitive user experience.
- uola 10y ago
  I can't say it's bad to update the IRC protocol, but I don't think it would make much difference either. What people don't realize with "decentralized" services is that they don't have a good ecosystem anymore. The web stack, which favors centralization, ships with usable encryption, user interface, distribution etc. To achieve similar end results with "conventional" stacks you will spend far more effort with far less developers to choose from. People tend to dismiss web application development for being careless, but at the same time forget that this is what made these clear text fairly rudimentary protocols popular. Until we get encryption built-in, more robust programming languages and figure out distribution on the desktop it's unlikely that the ecosystem will come back.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  If people are moving to other tools, you really can't say IRC is "superior for obvious reasons"
wingless 10y ago
Eugh. You could at least choose an open standard like Matrix. http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/
- op00to 10y ago
  Why?
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    To answer that question for yourself just requires reflecting on the benefits of open source vs. proprietary software. Also, in this particular case, Matrix also appears to be a well thought out platform for decentralised communication, one that is likely to be flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple different forms of communication.
- Kudos 10y ago
  I hadn't heard of this. I just spent the last hour setting up my own federated server and playing with some clients. This is pretty great! A lot like Slack in terms of UX, but without the corporate walled garden.
sotojuan 10y ago
I don't get this. Slack was made for small to medium teams. There's so many Slack chats are that unbearably slow (or expensive) because it can't handle that many users. Also, I have to get invited, check my email, sign up, and skip the tutorial every time?
hueving 10y ago
It's sad to me that open source projects so quickly reach for proprietary workflow tools like github and slack. There was a time when you would be laughed out of the room for suggesting that open source developers hinge a project on proprietary stuff. Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool.
- slgeorge 10y ago
  > Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies > that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool. I think it's more that originally FOSS developers/users were hard-core's who were into the tech and the ideology of 'Free Software'. The user-base now has many people who are into 'open source' for the collaborative (group motivation) and perceived technical benefits at an infrastructure level. It's a benefit because there's more 'free' code flowing around, but the downside is that as soon as a proprietary thing is better the user-base moves to it - they have no link with ideology, they're linked to utility.
JshWright 10y ago
I'm realizing an emoticon might have helped clarity here... ;)

vesinisa 10y ago

Interesting development. Apart from the original IRC specification published in 1993 and revised in 2000 (supposedly the namesake of "IRC v3") there has been quite little real standardisation work in IRC protocol, with various clients, servers and platforms each implementing their custom extensions.

danieloaks 10y ago
Standardisation is weird in IRC. From what I've seen, most of it that has happened has been the result of one group implementing their custom command/extension and then a bunch of other vendors implementing it in the same way (as well as all the interesting politics behind it all). There's a surprising amount that's been mostly-standardised over time, and not just from formal standards groups like the IETF or IRCv3. Related, I've been working on these sites for a while which I hope can be useful: http://defs.ircdocs.horse/ http://defs.ircdocs.horse/ http://modern.ircdocs.horse/ http://modern.ircdocs.horse/ Still, it's been really interesting to get into. It's nice seeing how things have gone so far and how they're going forward (and digging into the archives is always fun).

rwmj 10y ago

IRC (current version) works fine for me. The trick is to front it with ZNC or similar software. Anyway, why isn't this being done through the IETF?

daenney 10y ago
What's the advantages by doing it through the IETF? > IRC (current version) works fine for me. The trick is to front it with ZNC or similar software. But ZNC actually uses a bunch of IRCv3 features.
- ChoHag 10y ago
  You see that computer in front of you with its internet connection? All the things you don't think about, and most of the ones you do, work together the way they do because of the IETF. You see those other things that don't work together? Those are the ones the IETF didn't do.
  - daenney 10y ago
    I am more than well aware what the IETF is and what it has done. However, your response providers absolutely no answer to my question and is quite frankly patronising and rude. I asked why this should be done under the IETF? What are the benefits, specific to the IRC protocol, of doing this under the banner of the IETF versus not? What do you believe will be gained by doing this under the IETF? There's plenty of protocols and technologies that we use today that don't fall under the IETF banner and are plenty successful. The W3C is an organisation that comes to mind for example.
op00to 10y ago
For you. What about the millions of nontechnical people that need an open communication platform? We use IRC at my employer, and the complexity of getting a bouncer set up means that for cross time zone teams, most people miss any conversations that don't happen in their business hours. This has huge effects on collaboration.

nocarrier 10y ago

Why isn't encryption baked in by default? It's optional from what I can tell. I don't know how you can design a new protocol and not include encryption.

mtgx 10y ago
Exactly what I wanted to say. Why even bother if encryption is not included by default in the new protocol?
- ChoHag 10y ago
  Encryption is not a panacea. It's not a magic button that makes everything it touches "Secure!".
  - nocarrier 10y ago
    Indeed, but there is something to be said for sane defaults--look at the thread on HN a few weeks ago about SSH cipher defaults. Yes, TLS and the CA ecosystem has its faults, but my stance is that any chat protocol should be using auth and encryption, especially group chat protocols like IRC. I'm less upset now after seeing that the proposed spec for IRC 3.3 includes something similar to HSTS.
daenney 10y ago
> The IRCv3 Working Group is a collection of IRC client and server software authors working to enhance, maintain and standardize the IRC protocol using backwards-compatible extensions. It's not a new protocol.
- nocarrier 10y ago
  Fair enough, but I feel you're being a little pedantic since there are base extensions described which are required, and optional extensions which are not required. TLS is one of the optional extensions. So I'll reframe my question and ask: Why isn't TLS a base extension?

jbk 10y ago

That's a great idea. Maybe also backport some features of Slack, like edition of messages (with a flag marking it as edited), or a common way to have plugins/extensions, or tagging links as images.

daenney 10y ago
> like edition of messages (with a flag marking it as edited) This works on Slack but only with their client. Use one of the bridges and you have no clue what's going on and they have a centralised system for this. Syncing that somehow across all servers in an IRC network, across netsplits and everything, is far from simple. You'd also need to do this retroactively somehow if a client received a message, disconnects, the message is updated and the client then reconnects, in order to present an accurate history. > or a common way to have plugins/extensions IRC already has a way to allow for extensions. Or do you mean client side? > or tagging links as images I'm not sure the IRC protocol should care about that at all. It's more up to the client to detect image links and Glowing Bear for example already does and can display them inline.
- jbk 10y ago
  > Syncing that somehow across all servers in an IRC network, across netsplits and everything, is far from simple. Yes, it's not simple. But it's not impossible to do. And yes, it might not work in 100% of cases, after netsplits, but so what?
  - daenney 10y ago
    That matters a lot. Inconsistent history is a problem and leads to all kinds of communication issues and misunderstandings. You said you agreed on A No I edited it later to say that I meant I was in favour of B Oh, I never saw that edit...
    - jbk 10y ago
      That's exactly the same on Slack, and people like it.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

I second a comment made below regarding https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/. I've used IRC for years and still use it almost daily - but come on Mosh + tmux + ec2 just to have permanent chat history? I seriously can't advocate this crap to anyone in 2016. It's too little, too late.

Gruselbauer 10y ago
Well, yeah. When I was a teenager my group of friends used to use a QNet IRC chat for communications. Most on mIRC and such clients. Today it's pretty much all nerds. I do enjoy IRC, and pretty much live inside my tmux session, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it.
- Dowwie 10y ago
  Let me get this straight... you keep IRC running all day but you wouldn't recommend it to others because it's all nerds?
  - Gruselbauer 10y ago
    > but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, who were hard enough to get off WhatsApp and into Telegram at least. To my parents, who have trouble enough running Skype. To the girlfriend, who's happy with Snapchat. IRC, even at the very basic level with a GUI or Web client, demands things from users I don't consider realistic to expect from them. I'm very happy with it the way it is though. Just saying that I won't waste time recommending Arch Linux as a desktop OS to friends who have trouble keeping a Windows install useable for six months.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      You have to take it step by step. Otherwise people keep in their backward systems or habits forever.
- 10y ago

prawnsalad 10y ago

There's a lot of neat stuff in IRCv3 to bring IRC up to date, but most importantly it is standardising a lot of the existing protocol and patching up some of the existing warts that make pushing IRC difficult - all while being backwards compatible. Developing kiwiirc.com over the past few years to cover many different IRC servers in all different languages and using many different services/auth services has been a real pain. It won't improve overnight but these IRCv3 extensions making their way into many different IRC server projects are really helping to smooth things out. There is currently a re-write of the Kiwi IRC project to experiment and make use of the entire IRCv3 extension set, along with some other features to make web based IRC clients just as friendly and modern as people expect from messaging applications today. This will be a huge boost to the millions of people using IRC via Kiwi IRC. IRC is getting interesting again and IRCv3 is up there making a lot of this possible.

lovesIRC 10y ago
I use KiwiIRC each and everyday. It's one of the nicest looking and easiest to setup web frontend for my hybrid-ircd setup. Sadly it's just a small group of friends and an OLD eggdrop bot that runs a crusty old megahal.mod as entertainment. I haven't found anything that runs as well and can create humerous replies since then. Hopefully the old code will continue to compile for awhile. Anyway, I strayed off topic. I too am excited for IRCv3 and the future of IRC. I love the protocol, and despite it's drawbacks it serves my purpose well. And thank you for all your work on KiwiIRC. I love the project :)
- stryk 10y ago
  Bit off-topic, but Eggdrop was the very first thing I ever compiled from source WAY back in the later 1990's. I figured out how to hack together a (absolutely terrible) TCL script to monitor #fatefiles on EFNet for messages by certain nicks (a few XDCC bots) and echo them to another private channel. It was trash but it worked. One of my earliest experiences that I can remember with any sort of real code. Ahhhh, the good 'ol days.... great times. :-)
  - 10y ago

tarancato 10y ago

I don't feel like typing much because it's nap time but IRCv3 is an almost closed group of friends, mostly znc core developers, who have decided they can choose what the future of IRC looks like. They have put lots of pressure on and harassed other developers of clients and networks, sending them patches and infiltrating their devs if necessary, so their ideas are actually implemented. If you complain about those ideas and specs, they'll tell you to refer to their github issue tracker, but they mostly ignore those who are not part of that core group I mentioned.

prawnsalad 10y ago
While a number of people in the group are friends, I definitely wouldn't call it a closed group of friends. These are people that have been developing different IRC projects for many years, all discussing the protocol and making sure clients + servers actually work together. Friendships will come from this over years. A lot of the core group all work on different competing projects, servers and clients, and do frequently discuss any proposal made by anyone if it makes sense.
donatj 10y ago
I have seen exactly this happening on an IRC library I use for a bot.
- daenney 10y ago
  Where, when, how? You should provide some evidence to support such a claim or accusation.
perlgeek 10y ago
Sending patches to implement proposed protocol enhancements sounds like a pretty nice thing to do.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  That assumes everyone agrees that they really are enhancements.

paradite 10y ago

Looking at homepages of various IRC clients, I feel like I am back to 5 years ago when jQuery UI is still a thing: http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html Equally out-of-date are the screenshots of the clients on the homepages. I don't think I will ever see an IRC desktop or web client that has decent UI according to today's standard. Then again probably I am too young to be their target audience. Edit: Okay there are some IRC clients that actually look good, such as Riot, but not on the list of IRCv3 client.

prawnsalad 10y ago
If you're a designer yourself we could do with some design help on the Kiwi IRC project! It's one of the largest web based IRC clients and currently getting a rewrite at the moment, but we've always had a lack of design input unfortunately.
- paradite 10y ago
  Nah, I am not good at designing either. "Borrowing" from Slack is probably the way to go since people seem to like that. Btw, your file upload button at bottom right seems to be not working, it says "Application AisMDMMInTAOji478kuNxz is unavailable." when I click on it.
xPaw 10y ago
Try taking a look at The Lounge, it aims to be rather modern. https://thelounge.github.io https://thelounge.github.io
- derkha 10y ago
  Nice, this may make me finally move on from irssi
okket 10y ago
Have a look at Textual (macOS): https://www.codeux.com/textual/ https://www.codeux.com/textual/

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I'm not sure if this is the best approach. Matrix might be a better way to go, at least for some things. If you really want persistent history and persistent identity, I'm not sure why you bother with IRC at this point: both will always be second class there. Try XMPP, Matrix, Psyc, or whatever. Just so long as you can convince your friends to use it...

caf 10y ago
On IRC, your "persistent identity" was your user@hostname (and your nick is ephemeral). That's why the user@hostname is shown when a client joins a channel, or in WHO or WHOIS - and why bans match on nick!user@host. This worked great when people were typically using IRC from their login on a server at their university (and this is also originally why IRC servers used the 'ident' protocol when you connect - to stop you spoofing other users on the same shared system). It stopped being a viable persistent identity for all users when the @hostname part stopped being persistent - when people started gettting dynamically assigned addresses on internet connections at home.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ...Exactly.

Jizzle 10y ago

In many ways, the idea of IRC chat has grown significantly beyond the conventional client. From the ubiquity of chat for productivity in applications like HipChat to the hugely successful Twitch.tv platform, IRC has proven to be a viable backbone in these scenarios. It's quite nice then to see a concerted standardization effort. Hopefully, many of the proprietary features we might recognize today will be widespread and freely available in the future.

meira 10y ago

Is IRC v3 better than XMPP? There are any ircd as good as ejabberd?

c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y ago

My favourite bit is how they skipped adding length negotiation and it is causing them problems already. See the brief discussion of size limit on http://ircv3.net/specs/core/message-tags-3.2.html http://ircv3.net/specs/core/message-tags-3.2.html Adding tags forced them to increase message length because of how IRC messages are hilariously limited to 512 bytes in all directions. In the existing protocol you already have to guess how long your messages are allowed to be because the server tacks on a prefix to your message before relaying it, which can require it to truncate characters to fit the modified message into the length limit. Having some amount of tags tacked on as well would have made it impossible to guess how much room you had. Now if they had started with fixing the actual protocol they wouldn't have had to deal with that. Honestly this feels more like a standard "let's add cool stuff" push than intelligent stewardship of the protocol. I guess that is kind of cool too though.

kuschku 10y ago
Length negotiation has been discussed for years, but it’s not that easy. Imagine user A negotiates a length fo 1024 bytes with the server, user B negotiates a length of 2048 bytes. User B sends a message via the server to user A. What happens?
- c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y ago
  No, it isn't easy but that is what makes it the kind of thing that requires great spec work to accomplish. It would require proposing transitional steps and monitoring their adoption over a very long timeline. However reading their site more carefully I suppose their stated goal technically is to only provide extensions to the protocol. So the situation you describe already happens, user A has 512 bytes to send to the server, but the server has 512-prefix_length bytes to send to B. This is a flaw in the original protocol and the currently accepted solution is to truncate server-side(what to do is not stated explicitly, though it is implied that you probably shouldn't wrap messages). But fixing it is probably out of scope.
  - caf 10y ago

singularity2001 10y ago

same for voice would be nice. webrtc seems to fail as skype replacement (so far, in our network)

jwr 10y ago

I am very glad this is happening. IRC was one of the first applications I started using on the internet. These days it nearly disappeared because of closed silos like Facebook, Twitter and Slack. This effort could help bring back a decentralized service that is not under the control of any single company.

uxcn 10y ago
I'm a huge fan of the IRC protocol, and I think I've set up IRC channels at nearly every company I've worked for. Freenode and Weechat seem to support the changes, but I honestly worry that the protocol ends up more complicated than it needs to be, or possibly more complicated than people can use. Diaspora already provides a lot of what IRCv3 looks like it's trying to do. I guess I'm just not sure what the difference is.
Houshalter 10y ago
That's the sad thing about decentralized services, they follow a standard that doesn't get updated. Facebook and slack can add new features every month, but adding a new feature to email or IRC is so difficult.
- uxcn 10y ago
  Okay... I agree adding features to email and IRC are probably not the easiest things in the world. There are a number of useful features that have been added to email over time though, and I don't think decentralized control of the protocol is the bottleneck. Wave might or might not be a good example.

tete 10y ago

Apologies for being off topic. I am happy about this story now being on the front page. However, I don't really understand how reposts work. I always thought that URLs are a unique key. Is this a way to kind of "retry" them? In this case I'd be curious about how they work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12570201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12570201

wtbob 10y ago
I've had the same thing happen with a few of my submissions. On the one hand: cool, the story I liked is now being seen. But OTOH: not so cool, I like the HN metagame too.
Cogito 10y ago
Essentially, as I understand it, if multiple people submit the same exact URL in a short period of time, they count as votes on the first submission (this may well be completely wrong, but that is how I believe it works). After a period of time, new submissions are their own post, to allow submissions that did not get visibility have a chance at being seen. This is also sometimes done manually by the mods if they see something particularly interesting that was missed (not sure about the last point though again, I believe it to be true).

rachelbythebay 10y ago

It's still a graph with single points of failure throughout, right?

danieloaks 10y ago
For now, yeah. Devs from various servers are experimenting with alternate s2s protocols aiming to solve this though.
Senji 10y ago
An irc network can have several servers. If one goes down if the others are online you can connect to any one of them and still be ok. A net split will happen but they tend to resolve fast.

k__ 10y ago

I used IRC for over 10 years, but after using Slack for 1 it just felt outdated to me. Offline messages and simulatnous logins from multiple places are just two features I was missing in IRC and didn't even know till I had them, haha. But yeah, IRC networks just worked as message broker and not as databases, so I never thought about it.

DiabloD3 10y ago
I use ZNC, so logging in from multiple places works well.
- agentdrtran 10y ago
  But now you have to run a ZNC server as well - it's a lot more work for a very simple feature.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    WeeChat + relay clients can do it as well, you only run weechat in a tmux/screen somwhere and connect to it with a relay client (Glowing Bear or WeeChat-Android). Works nicely, with synced state and arbitrary history scrollback
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    It's not "very simple" - it's just that with Slack, someone else is running ZNC for you. Chat apps don't magically "just work" - either you run your own infrastructure, or use someone else's.
    - CJefferson 10y ago
      Even with IRC you are still using someone else' infrastructure -- unless you run your own IRC network from scratch of course.
      - nucleardog 10y ago

lucb1e 10y ago

They've been working on this for years and I'm seeing very little of it. And beyond that, it's missing everything we take for granted nowadays: scrollback, keeping note of where you were and media sharing. Yeah media sharing can be done with, what's it called, CTCP? That's just piping stuff through a short message service, like Twitter or DNS. It doesn't properly display media either, but it allows for small file transfers. And of course scrollback can be done with bouncers. But it's not something I see my mother using. Facebook Messenger is what I see my mother using. Is there anything new on the website, or it it just being linked again?

wcummings 10y ago
The ircv3 server-time extension can be used to implement scrollback intelligently, there's a ZNC plugin which does this.

drcross 10y ago

I run an XMPP server for myself and a few friend and have had no end to the trouble with it getting OTR or any level of encryption working reliably before friends lose their interest. Please, someone, just offer us an open source slack clone that runs off on a R-pi and has a walk through wizard to enable the 99% of typical install requirements. Even as someone who works in the industry, I dont have time to learn the bells and whistles that running a chat server requires.

majewsky 10y ago
Which problems did you run into? I use Prosody as the server (which is brain-dead simple to set up) and Conversations as the client on my friends' Android phones. We just add each others as buddies and set "OTR only" with two taps, and these problems are solved forever. I do agree though that the user experience for my OTR-enabled messengers is shit (especially the "first message not encrypted" problem).
upofadown 10y ago
If you are running your own server why would you need OTR? Normally connections to a single server are all TLS and work transparently.
aw3c2 10y ago
https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.RaspberryPi https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.RaspberryPi
c3833174 10y ago
Retroshare?
RandomlyGen 10y ago
Have you tried rocket.chat?

znpy 10y ago

I know I'll be dowvoted to oblivion but I'll say it anyway... You advocate for privacy, You advocate for openness, You advocate for transparency, You advocate for interoperability, You advocate for host-it-yourself, You advocate for customisability, You advocate for scriptability ... But then all of a sudden "oh no IRC, not enough colours, geez, running a bouncer, who wants to do it?" ------- I'd design irc-v3 to be bouncer-friendly, and maybe to integrate some bouncer-y features into IRC servers as well (most IRC servers keep logs anyway)

kbuck 10y ago
> (most IRC servers keep logs anyway) IRCd developer and network staff member here. Dead wrong. I don't think I've seen a single IRCd that keeps logs, and doing so would make it much more expensive to run an IRC network. Additionally, it would be a huge violation of privacy, and we value our users' privacy. The IRCd only logs server events (e.g. network-wide bans, server connection/disconnection, use of administrative tools) and user connections/disconnections (for anti-abuse purposes). If network staff have logs of something, it was either because their IRC client was present in the channel or because someone else gave them logs. Most of my network's servers hang around 2-3% CPU usage and <5GB disk usage, and we'd like to keep it that way because we don't want it to cost a lot to host. We have an average of 1000-2000 users per server.

grizzles 10y ago

To fix irc, the best thing they could do would be to add first class support for js and websockets.

majewsky 10y ago
I literally can't tell if this is satire.
- wtbob 10y ago
  Me neither. I hope it is, but … I just don't know any more.
- grizzles 10y ago
  It's not, but your comment made me smile. You seem to feel differently. Go ahead, tell me why it shouldn't be the case.
  - charonn0 10y ago
    I'm not the person you asked, but I share their opinion because JS and websockets do not appear to have any obvious relationship or applicability to IRC.
    - grizzles 10y ago
      A reason to do it is because most internet users >99.9% have a web browser. <0.01% have an irc client. You could argue that Twitter or Slack has sort of filled this niche for people who want to do #topic based chat but if the goal is to do it in an open protocol, then that's imo why it would be applicable to irc.
      - majewsky 10y ago
        Okay, but in which way is JS and WebSockets relevant to the IRC core protocol, if you usually have a proxy (such as KiwiIRC) which speaks IRC in the backend and HTTP/JS/websockets/whatever in the frontend.

jezfromfuture 10y ago

Who are these bunch of no Marks and why are they telling us what irc needs to be , signed the users of irc since the 80's

bborud 10y ago

I ran an IRCnet server for 15 years or so and when the PSU crapped out I decided 15 years would be enough. If I were to give one piece of advice: forget IRC. If you want to make a free, large scale chat system, just forget you ever saw IRC. There are no solutions in that neighborhood.

unixhero 10y ago

Unrealircd is imcredible, as far as irc servers go. I ran it with 300 concurrent users at a local LAN and was able to do a lot of excitimg things like load balancing between servers other cool things, already back in 2001.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

threatworking 10y ago

is there any place online where people hang out like irc used to be in the 2000s era? i've been looking for so long and desperately need to idle and /slap people around with a large trout ..asking for a friend..

Iggyhopper 10y ago

Apps like Discord are the new IRC.

PostOnce 10y ago
IRC is a protocol. Discord is a business. NNTP/usenet is a protocol. Reddit is a business. Email is a protocol. Facebook is a business. Protocols don't go bankrupt and close up shop. They'll still be around in 10 years. Protocols don't magically pull the rug out from under you, dictate how you use them, or suddenly change features you want and need without you having any ability to remain on the old system. They don't suddenly up the system requirements or discontinue support for old clients. I can still email from any device I ever could, palm pilot, powermac, whatever. Meanwhile your favorite app is dropping support for Android 4 or whatever 24months after release. Or app xyz no longer works on a 2 year old iOS. Protocols are something I can rely on. Businesses fly by night. I'm not going to start using Discord now and have it be gone this time next year, I've been using IRC for decades, and I'm going to keep using it. It works perfectly, everywhere. Especially if I have mosh and a server running my irc client somewhere else.

pmarreck 10y ago

I still use irccloud.com. Fave feature is preserving history so I can drop right into a conversation.

T3RMINATED 10y ago

Someone tell these IRC folks about Facebook Messenger.

jfe 10y ago

Do a substantial number of IRC users actually care that the current version of IRC lacks the features that IRCv3 proposes, or are we just modernizing because we want to make writing IRC bots more complicated?

SaberUK 10y ago
IRCv3 makes writing software easier not more complicated. Take the "away-notify" extension for example. Without it you would have to repeatedly poll a channel with WHO to see if all users in that channel have marked themselves as away.

kodisha 10y ago

We, small gaming community were using IRC as matchmaking "service" where we would all add to a queue, and the bot would then create teams based on players ranking. That worked quite nice, for ~15 years, and whole community was created, things worked quite nice, diehard users used BNC and terminals, but lately everyone is switching to Discord. Main matchmaking is still on IRC, but other sub-groups migrated to discord long ago, and that scares me, because no one at the moment knows what will happen with Discord year or two from now.

anindha 10y ago

From https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html/ https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html/ "IRCv3 exists and is addressing some of these issues; this is great news and we wish them well. It’s almost a contradiction in terms to get competitive between openly interoperable communication projects - we look forward to increasing the richness of Matrix<->IRC bridges as the project progresses." Why not merge the two projects or just focus on one? WebRTC seems to be a better protocol right now.

jrnichols 10y ago

I wish that there was just a solid way to prevent DDoS attacks and netsplits. IRC has always been one of my favorite communication mediums.

tofupup 10y ago

neat