5 ms·

100%, the fact that you can literally pipe some data in a command-line IRC client is 1000x more conducive to such tweaking than using custom APIs/SDKs long liv

100%, the fact that you can literally pipe some data in a command-line IRC client is 1000x more conducive to such tweaking than using custom APIs/SDKs long live the Unix model!

michaelt 5y ago
Doesn't that mean you get a channel join/leave for almost every message?
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  It is possible to post a message without joining if the channel has -n set (not the default for the obvious reason).
- crest 5y ago
  So clients can read lines from a pipe as stdin.
ferdowsi 5y ago
I don't see why you couldn't do the same in a Slack command-line program as well? Not hard to find simple examples of that. https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  I think the op meant on the protocol level, not client. You can literally do `cat mycommands.txt > /dev/tcp/...`. IRC is pretty simple, I remember using telnet just for fun to connect (also the PING message replies are annoying to type yourself) and at one time, (ab)used an FXPable FTP server data port trickery in ASCII mode to send a message to a channel. Due to its simplicity I could see its application as a falback for global communication downtime/outages (as we had with FB/Insta recently).
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Due to its simplicity I could see its application as a falback for global communication downtime/outages I remember when the solution to this, when everyone was still working in an office, was "pair of netcats".
- codys 5y ago
  Slack has made using their API much trickier over time: getting a token to post these days (officially) is under the control of the server admin (as one needs to add a "slack app" to get one). One can extract a token and some cookies from a web browser slack session still, but it's not as clean as it used to be (where one could just generate account associated tokens that didn't randomly expire). In other words: - to use the slack APIs, you probably need company level buy in _before_ any code is written against the API from IT folks - in contrast, with IRC one could just try something out and at some point in the future _maybe_ create a seperate IRC account for it, if your IRC server even has logins enabled. If it doesn't, which when I worked for IBM was the case, one can just pick a new username for the IRC bot.
jacobolus 5y ago
Beyond that, (a) implementing enough of the IRC protocol to support simple bots isn’t that hard, and (b) there are already IRC protocol implementations everywhere.

100%, the fact that you can literally pipe some data in a command-line IRC client is 1000x more conducive to such tweaking than using custom APIs/SDKs long live the Unix model!

michaelt 5y ago

Doesn't that mean you get a channel join/leave for almost every message?

lifthrasiir 5y ago
It is possible to post a message without joining if the channel has -n set (not the default for the obvious reason).
crest 5y ago
So clients can read lines from a pipe as stdin.

ferdowsi 5y ago

I don't see why you couldn't do the same in a Slack command-line program as well? Not hard to find simple examples of that. https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat

littlecranky67 5y ago
I think the op meant on the protocol level, not client. You can literally do `cat mycommands.txt > /dev/tcp/...`. IRC is pretty simple, I remember using telnet just for fun to connect (also the PING message replies are annoying to type yourself) and at one time, (ab)used an FXPable FTP server data port trickery in ASCII mode to send a message to a channel. Due to its simplicity I could see its application as a falback for global communication downtime/outages (as we had with FB/Insta recently).
- userbinator 5y ago
  Due to its simplicity I could see its application as a falback for global communication downtime/outages I remember when the solution to this, when everyone was still working in an office, was "pair of netcats".
codys 5y ago
Slack has made using their API much trickier over time: getting a token to post these days (officially) is under the control of the server admin (as one needs to add a "slack app" to get one). One can extract a token and some cookies from a web browser slack session still, but it's not as clean as it used to be (where one could just generate account associated tokens that didn't randomly expire). In other words: - to use the slack APIs, you probably need company level buy in _before_ any code is written against the API from IT folks - in contrast, with IRC one could just try something out and at some point in the future _maybe_ create a seperate IRC account for it, if your IRC server even has logins enabled. If it doesn't, which when I worked for IBM was the case, one can just pick a new username for the IRC bot.

jacobolus 5y ago

Beyond that, (a) implementing enough of the IRC protocol to support simple bots isn’t that hard, and (b) there are already IRC protocol implementations everywhere.