9 ms·

These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened beca

by lol768 6y ago

These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened because you'd see the clients disconnect. IME messages just fail to send with Slack, then you can retry but they're not properly idempotent and you end up sending the messages twice. It's really poor.

karmicthreat 6y ago
EFnet was always splitting every few hours. I don't really miss IRC compared to modern chat systems.
- randylahey 6y ago
  I'm the opposite. Back when in my early teens, friends and I would attempt to hijack opposing groups' channels via takeovers during net-splits (and ofcourse having the same done to us). What a time to be alive.
  - libraryatnight 6y ago
    In the early battle.net days competing clans would split and steal channels. It was tons of fun. Taught me lots about bots, proxies, simple scripting, in the process too.
  - stormcode 6y ago
    Oh yeah, those were the days. Causing server splits to get your nick back that was stolen in a previous server split...
- pmlnr 6y ago
  I do miss them, terribly. Lightweight, fast, brutally simple. Even with splits, it was better, and ever since IRC bouncers exist, like ZNC, they are rock solid.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  I spent a few hours setting up a chat client for a reason. Slack takes all this away from me.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
To be fair, IRC doesn't do a lot of things Slack does. Where is the logging and audit trails, access control, search, etc.
- spicybright 6y ago
  I'm still dreaming of a world where everyone uses IRC through an interface identical to Slack or Discord or whatever, and features like these are implemented.
  - thinkmassive 6y ago
    You might appreciate matrix.org / element.io if you haven’t seen them yet
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      I setup my own Matrix homeserver recently with several bridges to all my current chat services: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-rule-them-all/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-r... It works fairly well.
  - dijit 6y ago
    You might like irccloud; it's a web client (similar to slack) and bouncer, with support for image uploads, has a decent app, preserving history and I think it supports search too.
  - welterde 6y ago
    Not really a fan of the Slack or Discord user interface myself, but there are modern looking web clients for IRC such as thelounge[0] or kiwiirc[1] that might be what you are after. [0] https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [1] https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/
  - curryst 6y ago
    I agree in principle, but IRC is a poor way to do this. I love IRC for it's simplicity, but that makes it hard to do more advanced features. It's a text-only protocol (other than DCC), so if you want to do something like allow users to click phone numbers to dial them then you have to regex it and hope for the best. Any kind of link is the same way. If you want to show images inline, you'll have to search for links, then either do another regex to see if the link is an image or prefetch the page to see if it's an image. Most servers still implement user authentication as a secondary service (i.e. it isn't part of the IRC server itself) afaik. I think the newer IRC specs include those, but support for it is missing in many servers. Really a huge part of IRC's difficulty and beauty is in not having a markup language, but most of that beauty is for the eyes of the developer, not the user. I like the concept of Matrix. That's kind of what they're trying to do by creating an open protocol, but when I looked at implementing a client it was non-trivial. For IRC, you can usually send someone a telnet log of you joining an IRC server and they could implement a client. I don't get the impression that that's true for Matrix.
coldcode 6y ago
My feeling is this is an AWS issue. Our services hosted in AWS are not working either.
- tedmiston 6y ago
  Do you have more info like services, regions etc? I see all green checks on the AWS Status page.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    Down detector shows quite a lot of issues across a broad spectrum of services, including AWS and Google.
  - coldcode 6y ago
    Our prod systems seem to be working, but our lower environments seems to be not working. I don't know enough about where these things come from. I wonder if the real problem is regional. Some connections work and some don't.
  - dijit 6y ago
    > I see all green checks on the AWS Status page. I'm sure you know this already, but that status page isn't worth the cycles on your CPU, you would be better served asking the toaster if AWS is functioning properly than checking that status page.
    - tedmiston 6y ago
      Of course, yeah, but at least you can sometimes see a yellow and infer it really means red :/.
      - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
        yellow requires an issue that every customer is aware of and red requires a thermonuclear strike.
    - 6y ago
bdcravens 6y ago
Our company uses Cliq. I wouldn't say that it's as good as Slack, but it's probably 80-90%, and even has a few unique features (integration into Zoho's suite, remote work checkin, integrated bot development environment, etc)
013a 6y ago
Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives. * WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users. * Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2] * Discord, 100M monthly actives [3] * Slack, 12M daily actives [4] * Teams, which is certainly more popular than Slack, but I shudder to list it because its stability may actually be worse. The old piece of wisdom that "real-time chat is hard" is something I've always taken at face-value as being true, because it is hard, but some of the most stable, highest scale services I've ever interfaced with are chat services. iMessage NEVER goes down. I have to conclude that Slack's unacceptable instability, even relative to more static services like Jira, is less the product of the difficulty of their product domain, and moreso something far deeper and more unfixable. I would not assume that this will improve after they are fully integrated with Salesforce. If your company is on Slack, its time to investigate an alternative, and I'm fearful of the fact that there are very few strong ones in the enterprise world. [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-world-privately https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-monthly-active-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-... [3] https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-shifts-away-from-gaming/ https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-million-daily-active-users.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-mil... (this was also announced on Slack's blog, but that's down).
- jjice 6y ago
  I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio and video service that I've used, especially kicking Zoom to the curb.
  - 6y ago

by lol768 6y ago

karmicthreat 6y ago

EFnet was always splitting every few hours. I don't really miss IRC compared to modern chat systems.

randylahey 6y ago
I'm the opposite. Back when in my early teens, friends and I would attempt to hijack opposing groups' channels via takeovers during net-splits (and ofcourse having the same done to us). What a time to be alive.
- libraryatnight 6y ago
  In the early battle.net days competing clans would split and steal channels. It was tons of fun. Taught me lots about bots, proxies, simple scripting, in the process too.
- stormcode 6y ago
  Oh yeah, those were the days. Causing server splits to get your nick back that was stolen in a previous server split...
pmlnr 6y ago
I do miss them, terribly. Lightweight, fast, brutally simple. Even with splits, it was better, and ever since IRC bouncers exist, like ZNC, they are rock solid.
dkdk8283 6y ago
I spent a few hours setting up a chat client for a reason. Slack takes all this away from me.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

To be fair, IRC doesn't do a lot of things Slack does. Where is the logging and audit trails, access control, search, etc.

spicybright 6y ago
I'm still dreaming of a world where everyone uses IRC through an interface identical to Slack or Discord or whatever, and features like these are implemented.
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  You might appreciate matrix.org / element.io if you haven’t seen them yet
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    I setup my own Matrix homeserver recently with several bridges to all my current chat services: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-rule-them-all/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-r... It works fairly well.
- dijit 6y ago
  You might like irccloud; it's a web client (similar to slack) and bouncer, with support for image uploads, has a decent app, preserving history and I think it supports search too.
- welterde 6y ago
  Not really a fan of the Slack or Discord user interface myself, but there are modern looking web clients for IRC such as thelounge[0] or kiwiirc[1] that might be what you are after. [0] https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [1] https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/
- curryst 6y ago
  I agree in principle, but IRC is a poor way to do this. I love IRC for it's simplicity, but that makes it hard to do more advanced features. It's a text-only protocol (other than DCC), so if you want to do something like allow users to click phone numbers to dial them then you have to regex it and hope for the best. Any kind of link is the same way. If you want to show images inline, you'll have to search for links, then either do another regex to see if the link is an image or prefetch the page to see if it's an image. Most servers still implement user authentication as a secondary service (i.e. it isn't part of the IRC server itself) afaik. I think the newer IRC specs include those, but support for it is missing in many servers. Really a huge part of IRC's difficulty and beauty is in not having a markup language, but most of that beauty is for the eyes of the developer, not the user. I like the concept of Matrix. That's kind of what they're trying to do by creating an open protocol, but when I looked at implementing a client it was non-trivial. For IRC, you can usually send someone a telnet log of you joining an IRC server and they could implement a client. I don't get the impression that that's true for Matrix.

coldcode 6y ago

My feeling is this is an AWS issue. Our services hosted in AWS are not working either.

tedmiston 6y ago
Do you have more info like services, regions etc? I see all green checks on the AWS Status page.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Down detector shows quite a lot of issues across a broad spectrum of services, including AWS and Google.
- coldcode 6y ago
  Our prod systems seem to be working, but our lower environments seems to be not working. I don't know enough about where these things come from. I wonder if the real problem is regional. Some connections work and some don't.
- dijit 6y ago
  > I see all green checks on the AWS Status page. I'm sure you know this already, but that status page isn't worth the cycles on your CPU, you would be better served asking the toaster if AWS is functioning properly than checking that status page.
  - tedmiston 6y ago
    Of course, yeah, but at least you can sometimes see a yellow and infer it really means red :/.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      yellow requires an issue that every customer is aware of and red requires a thermonuclear strike.
  - 6y ago

bdcravens 6y ago

Our company uses Cliq. I wouldn't say that it's as good as Slack, but it's probably 80-90%, and even has a few unique features (integration into Zoho's suite, remote work checkin, integrated bot development environment, etc)

013a 6y ago

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives. * WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users. * Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2] * Discord, 100M monthly actives [3] * Slack, 12M daily actives [4] * Teams, which is certainly more popular than Slack, but I shudder to list it because its stability may actually be worse. The old piece of wisdom that "real-time chat is hard" is something I've always taken at face-value as being true, because it is hard, but some of the most stable, highest scale services I've ever interfaced with are chat services. iMessage NEVER goes down. I have to conclude that Slack's unacceptable instability, even relative to more static services like Jira, is less the product of the difficulty of their product domain, and moreso something far deeper and more unfixable. I would not assume that this will improve after they are fully integrated with Salesforce. If your company is on Slack, its time to investigate an alternative, and I'm fearful of the fact that there are very few strong ones in the enterprise world. [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-world-privately https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-monthly-active-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-... [3] https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-shifts-away-from-gaming/ https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-million-daily-active-users.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-mil... (this was also announced on Slack's blog, but that's down).

jjice 6y ago
I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio and video service that I've used, especially kicking Zoom to the curb.
- 6y ago