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We need IRC with a few tweaks. There’s quite a few holes in IRC’s spec including lack of a scrollback support. But yes, there is no need to be making everything

We need IRC with a few tweaks. There’s quite a few holes in IRC’s spec including lack of a scrollback support. But yes, there is no need to be making everything its own proprietary system.

walrus01 7y ago
The old school solution to lack of scrollback support in IRC, and similar, is to run a persistent irc client (bitchx or irssi) inside screen or similar software, on a linux or bsd shell system, which has 24x7x365 uptime and network connectivity. And then to connect and disconnect to the screen session as needed. Properly implemented, I've had much better availability with this sort of solution than with Slack. I've seen multiple hour outages of Slack services just within the past 6 months, it's well below four or five nines reliability.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  The problem is, that only fixes IRC for you, not the other 99.9% of users who you are presumably there to communicate with. Slack/Discord/etc. fix the problem for everyone. Trying to community-build on IRC just seems like an exercise in masochism. I think most projects and their users deserve better than that, and it's hard to do worse than IRC.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    I absolutely agree that a semi-public or public community built on irc would not be the way to go in 2020. In my use case it's for much smaller groups of individuals who all know and work with each other, within private companies and small work groups.
dane-pgp 7y ago
Fortunately, "IRC with a few tweaks" is being actively developed under the name IRCv3 and it seems that scrollback support is defined by a combination of these specifications: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3 https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/393/files https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/393/files

We need IRC with a few tweaks. There’s quite a few holes in IRC’s spec including lack of a scrollback support. But yes, there is no need to be making everything its own proprietary system.

walrus01 7y ago

The old school solution to lack of scrollback support in IRC, and similar, is to run a persistent irc client (bitchx or irssi) inside screen or similar software, on a linux or bsd shell system, which has 24x7x365 uptime and network connectivity. And then to connect and disconnect to the screen session as needed. Properly implemented, I've had much better availability with this sort of solution than with Slack. I've seen multiple hour outages of Slack services just within the past 6 months, it's well below four or five nines reliability.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
The problem is, that only fixes IRC for you, not the other 99.9% of users who you are presumably there to communicate with. Slack/Discord/etc. fix the problem for everyone. Trying to community-build on IRC just seems like an exercise in masochism. I think most projects and their users deserve better than that, and it's hard to do worse than IRC.
- walrus01 7y ago
  I absolutely agree that a semi-public or public community built on irc would not be the way to go in 2020. In my use case it's for much smaller groups of individuals who all know and work with each other, within private companies and small work groups.

dane-pgp 7y ago

Fortunately, "IRC with a few tweaks" is being actively developed under the name IRCv3 and it seems that scrollback support is defined by a combination of these specifications: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3 https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/393/files https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/393/files