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Because IRC is old and badly designed. People keep talking about IRC but no one want to go back there because it's just bad compare to Slack, there is no histor

by Thaxll 8y ago

Because IRC is old and badly designed. People keep talking about IRC but no one want to go back there because it's just bad compare to Slack, there is no history, no rich text, no integration what's so ever to anything recent.

darkpuma 8y ago
> People keep talking about IRC but no one want to go back there Speak for yourself. I never left and I find it very tedious when I'm forced to use anything else. In practice 90% of the justification for any other system seems to be that people want to post inane cat pictures at each other. That just isn't worth the tradeoffs for me. The 'modern replacements' for IRC are even bigger workplace distractions than IRC.
- overtmind 8y ago
  Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope? I use RocketChat for my consulting business for a few reasons that are largely unavailable on IRC without bots: 1) Rich text and syntax highlighting - Small properly fenced off code blocks are a wonder. Contrast that to IRC where it would never look quite right, relies on the other person's client to have monospaced fonts, and usually gets you yelled at for flooding 2) URL expanding - Viewing titles and a snippet of the content is useful. Requires bots on IRC. 3) File sharing in a trivial non-p2p. Nobody liked DCC, and I shudder thinking of going back to opening port ranges for that. 4) Reliability of having a central history which alleviates needing a bouncer, and reduces how important a stable connection actually is. The only other thing you could come back with is to use yet other external platforms to alleviate those issues like: For 1) An external public/private pastebin solution For 2) A bot as I already said For 3) An external filsharing service: Dropbox, Nextcloud, etc For 4) External bnc: ZNC, bip, weechat, irssi etc RocketChat, Mattermost, Slack, et al incorporate all of those things and more and are inherently useful - Plus, if you're the administrator you don't have to enable gifs or cat pictures, yes that shit is dumb.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    IRC bots are trivial to implement and run so I don't consider many of these, which are commonly provided by IRC bots, as legitimate arguments against IRC. I don't consider "but you need a bot" to be a legitimate gripe. Rich text is generally worthless except for code highlighting, but pasting large amounts of code into the channel is generally considered antisocial on IRC anyway, and pastebin services are used for this. It's not unusual for a company to provide their own internal pastebin services anyway, since it's generally useful with other systems like email. Ditto file sharing. > "Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope?" No, because in my personal experience that is OVERWHELMINGLY the most frequently used feature of slack/etc that's not present in IRC. For every time I've seen pasted code, I've seen easily a hundred inane pasted memes. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't earnestly believe it's the primary reason people prefer systems other than IRC.
jlarocco 8y ago
I'm sorry, but Slack is garbage, and those complaints are silly. Having to search the entire conversation history in the chat window is a terrible idea because it's slow and difficult to use. Having a separate tool or page to search history is a superior solution, and software exists to do that in IRC. Rich text is over rated, and 99% of messages don't use it anyway. Believe it or not nobody wants to see your silly gif, and they'd be just fine with :-) instead of an emoji. Integrating with IRC is also trivial because its a standardized open protocol and there are a ton of tools available. It doesn't need a bunch of pre-fab "integrations" because it's not using a dumb proprietary API. But having an IT guy spend half a day properly setting up an IRC server is hard and it doesn't have a crappy web UI by default, so lets all use Slack.
- toofy 8y ago
  While I personally prefer irc and definitely agree that an open protocol along the lines of irc should be the direction we head towards, I think it may be a bit shortsighted to imply users don’t prefer things such as in app searching and it definitely seems they love gifs. I’m pretty sure asking users to leave their app and go to a separate webpage to search wouldn’t sit well with most users, particularly people who are involved in some kind of deadline for their project—what we might brush off as “it’s just like two extra clicks!” is actually much more disrupting. It pulls you out of your workflow and those extra clicks feel like they add up over time. While some of us may sneer at chat apps like Slack, it’s obvious their UX/UI heavily resonates with users. We should be looking at why users absolutely prefer Slack and see if we can build a client based on an open protocol which will give the user experience most users prefer while still maintaining an irc type experience for users like us.
- kccqzy 8y ago
  > Having to search the entire conversation history in the chat window is a terrible idea because it's slow and difficult to use. Having a separate tool or page to search history is a superior solution, and software exists to do that in IRC. I have to disagree with this. Having to search for historical messages right where you can see recent messages is convenient. Using a different tool (potentially with a different UI) increases the context switch overhead. And there's no reason the search must be slow; the current chat window can display a portion of the messages, and the search can be done either on the server, or a background thread searching a database locally. Slack in particular has some bad engineering to make its UI slow and memory-hungry, but many of its copycats are actually functionally similar yet much faster.
claudiawerner 8y ago
A few of these are being discussed as part of IRCv3, and in my experience bouncers (or something like IRCCloud) work alright (though maybe not perfectly) for history. And there's plenty of "integration" if you can use bots.
- loeg 8y ago
  Hybrid clients like Quassel even have a sort of integrated bouncer you run on a server that provides native offline history for the client-side GUI.
cryptonector 8y ago
I care about federation, scalability, robustness, access to past messages (history, as you put it) and disconnected operation (e.g., access missed messages on reconnect) -- that sort of thing. Maybe file sharing. The only rich text features I use are: code quoting, and text quoting, and I just don't need those if I'm using a traditional IRC/XMPP client. I don't care about text styling or formatting, or emoticons. IRC is ancient, and pretty much broken, but it still works fantastically well for some things, and I really like having a text-based client to run in a tmux. EDIT: IRC, XMPP, and such, support integration just fine via bots.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  > I care about federation, scalability, robustness, access to past messages (history, as you put it) and disconnected operation (e.g., access missed messages on reconnect) Apart from federation you’ve described Slack. Neither IRC nor Jabber give it to you out of the box. Slack does.
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    IRC and XMPP are protocols. Slack is a service. I think IRCCloud has all of those features.
gsich 8y ago
You can write IRC bots in any language you want.

by Thaxll 8y ago

darkpuma 8y ago

> People keep talking about IRC but no one want to go back there Speak for yourself. I never left and I find it very tedious when I'm forced to use anything else. In practice 90% of the justification for any other system seems to be that people want to post inane cat pictures at each other. That just isn't worth the tradeoffs for me. The 'modern replacements' for IRC are even bigger workplace distractions than IRC.

overtmind 8y ago
Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope? I use RocketChat for my consulting business for a few reasons that are largely unavailable on IRC without bots: 1) Rich text and syntax highlighting - Small properly fenced off code blocks are a wonder. Contrast that to IRC where it would never look quite right, relies on the other person's client to have monospaced fonts, and usually gets you yelled at for flooding 2) URL expanding - Viewing titles and a snippet of the content is useful. Requires bots on IRC. 3) File sharing in a trivial non-p2p. Nobody liked DCC, and I shudder thinking of going back to opening port ranges for that. 4) Reliability of having a central history which alleviates needing a bouncer, and reduces how important a stable connection actually is. The only other thing you could come back with is to use yet other external platforms to alleviate those issues like: For 1) An external public/private pastebin solution For 2) A bot as I already said For 3) An external filsharing service: Dropbox, Nextcloud, etc For 4) External bnc: ZNC, bip, weechat, irssi etc RocketChat, Mattermost, Slack, et al incorporate all of those things and more and are inherently useful - Plus, if you're the administrator you don't have to enable gifs or cat pictures, yes that shit is dumb.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  IRC bots are trivial to implement and run so I don't consider many of these, which are commonly provided by IRC bots, as legitimate arguments against IRC. I don't consider "but you need a bot" to be a legitimate gripe. Rich text is generally worthless except for code highlighting, but pasting large amounts of code into the channel is generally considered antisocial on IRC anyway, and pastebin services are used for this. It's not unusual for a company to provide their own internal pastebin services anyway, since it's generally useful with other systems like email. Ditto file sharing. > "Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope?" No, because in my personal experience that is OVERWHELMINGLY the most frequently used feature of slack/etc that's not present in IRC. For every time I've seen pasted code, I've seen easily a hundred inane pasted memes. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't earnestly believe it's the primary reason people prefer systems other than IRC.

jlarocco 8y ago

I'm sorry, but Slack is garbage, and those complaints are silly. Having to search the entire conversation history in the chat window is a terrible idea because it's slow and difficult to use. Having a separate tool or page to search history is a superior solution, and software exists to do that in IRC. Rich text is over rated, and 99% of messages don't use it anyway. Believe it or not nobody wants to see your silly gif, and they'd be just fine with :-) instead of an emoji. Integrating with IRC is also trivial because its a standardized open protocol and there are a ton of tools available. It doesn't need a bunch of pre-fab "integrations" because it's not using a dumb proprietary API. But having an IT guy spend half a day properly setting up an IRC server is hard and it doesn't have a crappy web UI by default, so lets all use Slack.

toofy 8y ago
While I personally prefer irc and definitely agree that an open protocol along the lines of irc should be the direction we head towards, I think it may be a bit shortsighted to imply users don’t prefer things such as in app searching and it definitely seems they love gifs. I’m pretty sure asking users to leave their app and go to a separate webpage to search wouldn’t sit well with most users, particularly people who are involved in some kind of deadline for their project—what we might brush off as “it’s just like two extra clicks!” is actually much more disrupting. It pulls you out of your workflow and those extra clicks feel like they add up over time. While some of us may sneer at chat apps like Slack, it’s obvious their UX/UI heavily resonates with users. We should be looking at why users absolutely prefer Slack and see if we can build a client based on an open protocol which will give the user experience most users prefer while still maintaining an irc type experience for users like us.
kccqzy 8y ago
> Having to search the entire conversation history in the chat window is a terrible idea because it's slow and difficult to use. Having a separate tool or page to search history is a superior solution, and software exists to do that in IRC. I have to disagree with this. Having to search for historical messages right where you can see recent messages is convenient. Using a different tool (potentially with a different UI) increases the context switch overhead. And there's no reason the search must be slow; the current chat window can display a portion of the messages, and the search can be done either on the server, or a background thread searching a database locally. Slack in particular has some bad engineering to make its UI slow and memory-hungry, but many of its copycats are actually functionally similar yet much faster.

claudiawerner 8y ago

A few of these are being discussed as part of IRCv3, and in my experience bouncers (or something like IRCCloud) work alright (though maybe not perfectly) for history. And there's plenty of "integration" if you can use bots.

loeg 8y ago
Hybrid clients like Quassel even have a sort of integrated bouncer you run on a server that provides native offline history for the client-side GUI.

cryptonector 8y ago

I care about federation, scalability, robustness, access to past messages (history, as you put it) and disconnected operation (e.g., access missed messages on reconnect) -- that sort of thing. Maybe file sharing. The only rich text features I use are: code quoting, and text quoting, and I just don't need those if I'm using a traditional IRC/XMPP client. I don't care about text styling or formatting, or emoticons. IRC is ancient, and pretty much broken, but it still works fantastically well for some things, and I really like having a text-based client to run in a tmux. EDIT: IRC, XMPP, and such, support integration just fine via bots.

dmitriid 8y ago
> I care about federation, scalability, robustness, access to past messages (history, as you put it) and disconnected operation (e.g., access missed messages on reconnect) Apart from federation you’ve described Slack. Neither IRC nor Jabber give it to you out of the box. Slack does.
- pseudalopex 8y ago
  IRC and XMPP are protocols. Slack is a service. I think IRCCloud has all of those features.

gsich 8y ago

You can write IRC bots in any language you want.