5 ms·

When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern

When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text in real time" is harder and worse (search, sharing files, sending long messages, mobile support, etc.) and everyone has to scrounge for their own tools to work around these insufficiencies. In a work environment, using a tool that only does part of what you need it to do is a crazy irresponsible use of resources. IRC might be useful in some circumstances, but supporting team communication—especially for remote teams—is not one of those circumstances.

izacus 8y ago
How is that different from Slack though? Did people use bouncers that don't set /away ?
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  On slack it shows whether someone is active or away. It also guarantees they'll get the message. You're not praying that you picked the right bouncer to direct your message at and that it's configured to let them know when they get back.
  - dijit 8y ago
    You can easily see if someone is active or not. Most clients even tell you that the user is away. The other problem you describe is related to it being an open standard. If you had a custom slack client or server you also would not be able to make assumptions about how it works on the remote end.
    - bastawhiz 8y ago
      If you're an organization like Mozilla that uses IRC for company business, you can just tell employees what they must support (with an or closed product).
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had to use for serious work. They have better UX design for indicating availability, but I can't think of one where it's consistently worked the way I expect it to. Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status; others have some mixture of caching/update issues and strange criteria for deciding whether a user is "active" or "present" such that the indicator isn't very reliable in practice.
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  > Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status That's not an issue with the tech, it's an issue with the people. I'm not shooting off messages with no idea of whether they'll arrive, I'm at least trusting the person's intended availability. If they're just being an ass and marking themselves as perpetually unavailable, that's an issue I'd take up with their manager. In my experience, modern systems like slack and discord (and even hipchat) work well enough with their availability indicators. Chat apps five years ago I would not trust as much.

izacus 8y ago

How is that different from Slack though? Did people use bouncers that don't set /away ?

bastawhiz 8y ago
On slack it shows whether someone is active or away. It also guarantees they'll get the message. You're not praying that you picked the right bouncer to direct your message at and that it's configured to let them know when they get back.
- dijit 8y ago
  You can easily see if someone is active or not. Most clients even tell you that the user is away. The other problem you describe is related to it being an open standard. If you had a custom slack client or server you also would not be able to make assumptions about how it works on the remote end.
  - bastawhiz 8y ago
    If you're an organization like Mozilla that uses IRC for company business, you can just tell employees what they must support (with an or closed product).

0xcde4c3db 8y ago

> You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had to use for serious work. They have better UX design for indicating availability, but I can't think of one where it's consistently worked the way I expect it to. Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status; others have some mixture of caching/update issues and strange criteria for deciding whether a user is "active" or "present" such that the indicator isn't very reliable in practice.

bastawhiz 8y ago
> Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status That's not an issue with the tech, it's an issue with the people. I'm not shooting off messages with no idea of whether they'll arrive, I'm at least trusting the person's intended availability. If they're just being an ass and marking themselves as perpetually unavailable, that's an issue I'd take up with their manager. In my experience, modern systems like slack and discord (and even hipchat) work well enough with their availability indicators. Chat apps five years ago I would not trust as much.