11 ms·

Grove is here to stay

93 points by jacobian 14y ago

patrickaljord 14y ago
Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgrove.io%2Fblog%2Fgrove-here-stay http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...
thedjpetersen 14y ago
Congratulations to the Grove.io team! Its great that this product is able to keep going. I have been following Grove.io pretty closely. This is a subject that is fairly interesting to me and compelled me to look at some of the different open source options[0], as they do exist for teams that are able to run their own chat. I decided to write my own chat client with a fellow HNer called Subway[1], since I could not find a good open source web client that persisted a connection while a user was offline. After I started I found another large project that more or less accomplishes the same thing called Alice[2] written in Perl. Both these clients have more or less the same goal to persist your connection while you are offline. For those interested in a paid alternative to grove there is also IRCCloud[3] which accomplishes the same thing. [0] http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/ http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/ [1] https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway [2] https://github.com/leedo/alice https://github.com/leedo/alice [3] https://irccloud.com/ https://irccloud.com/
- stephen_mcd 14y ago
  Here's my own one I recently built: https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views around it. Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket. On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.
- yb66 14y ago
  What would a persistent connection do for me if I'm offline? (honest question)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
seryl 14y ago
"Grove is here to stay"... clicks link > curl -i https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Server: nginx/1.1.17 Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:33:13 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 193 Connection: close <html> <head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx/1.1.17</center> </body> </html> Well, hopefully they get it on it's feet again. But it's good to hear!
frankwiles 14y ago
Yeah apparently the blog wasn't up to HN level traffic! I'll get that sorted out asap!
dchuk 14y ago
When I clicked this, I assumed it was going to be Grove going back on their statement that they were closing down, and I was concerned. That sort of wavering doesn't bode well for customer trust. In a weird way, I'm glad someone else is in charge not because the Grove team was bad, but from a PR perspective this just looks good.
hnuser100 14y ago
500 Internal Server Error nginx/1.1.17
aggronn 14y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am. $10/month for 5 users on IRC? This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service. I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.
- mibbitier 14y ago
  Imagine if they did it for email... "Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails." As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.
  - asdf333 14y ago
    not everyone wants to worry about managing a vps. you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.
- simonw 14y ago
  "Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo" If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL. Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.
  - problemdomain 14y ago
    It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month. I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous. Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
jslatts 14y ago
Sorry. We already moved to flowdock (https://www.flowdock.com https://www.flowdock.com). Turns out its about 1000x more appropriate for us anyway as a central dev status hub. I would encourage any dev team who was using grove.io to check it out. IRC client compatible!
zalzane 14y ago
Wow, check out that pricing. What a fucking disaster. 5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user) 10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user) 20 users for 50$/mo (2.5$/user) 50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user) I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a service.
- thibaut_barrere 14y ago
  I know a good bunch of 2 to 5 sized companies that would pay for that, all highly competent people (and able to do that themselves). They are just "outsourcing" the low-value stuff in favor of their core business.
  - zalzane 14y ago
    For a 2 to 5 size company, I don't see why they don't just use a public IRC server and set mode +irsp to a private channel.
    - thibaut_barrere 14y ago
      Because some businesses just won't use a public IRC server for various policy reasons (including policies required by their own customers), while using a paid server from a third party could be accepted. That's just one example.
      - problemdomain 14y ago
        That's the intersection of the following sets: * Small companies. * With some legal or contractual obligation preventing use of a public IRC server. * But not preventing use of a third-party outside-the-firewall solution. * And not having any criteria for the third-party, such as HIPAA compliance, warranties/guarantees, etc. Seems a pretty small set... Interestingly, grove doesn't seem to promise not to disclose the archives of your "private" server at all. Lots of ass-covering in their Terms of Service in favor of grove, and they have a privacy policy pertaining to their website, but nothing I could find about not telling the world whatever you happen to send their IRC servers.
mutru 14y ago
And https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/ is still going to be around, with way better reliability, IRC support, more and better integrations & much more. :) A Grove.io importer was also added yesterday: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-account-into-flowdock/ http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-acc...
- martindale 14y ago
  This is awesome, but appears to be broken right now.
  - mutru 14y ago
    If you think you've found a bug, please let us know by tweeting or emailing team@, and we'll get it fixed. We haven't had downtime in 2 months, so I'm curious what seemed to be broken.
Karunamon 14y ago
I never understood the pricing. IRC Servers are completely free and dead simple to set up. $10 a month for a room limited to 5 users for just a pretty frontend to IRC? Why does this exist?
- ascendant 14y ago
  You've just described almost every modern Internet-enabled convenience built on decades-old protocols. I suppose if people followed your line of thinking we'd still be doing command-line everything. I'm not very excited by that prospect and glad that not everyone shares your viewpoint on what's valuable and what's not.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  To the one reply to this: You've been hellbanned - sorry guy. I see some great stuff in your comment history, apparently some overzealous idiot of a mod didn't like that you posted that article on controlling a forum.
endlessvoid94 14y ago
It's unbelievable how many haters there are. Unbelievable.
dustywusty 14y ago
Interestingly, their email lacked an unsubscribe link.
- frankwiles 14y ago
  That's a big oversight, email me frank@revsys.com and I'll make sure you don't receive anymore email. I hate that shit, our bad.
apiengine 14y ago
I love Grove.io, works for geeks and regular users and easy webhooks. My channel has everything I want and I've never spent longer than a few minutes configuring things.
ryanwaggoner 14y ago
In this thread: software developers who make $1xx / hr complain about paying a monthly fee that's worth less than the time it took to write the comments in question. Makes me glad I don't sell to software developers.
hogu 14y ago
We already moved to flowdock, it seems better so far, primarily because it's STABLE! When I used grove, the web client was basically unuseable, and even our IRC clients got disconnected periodically. The worse part is, the IRC disconnect was often times silent - as in, you would think that you were signed in, but none of your messages were sent, or you wouldn't actually receive messages. Presence in IRC (the users that it showed as being in the room) would become out of date quickly, and I frequently reconnected just to get an updated list of who was available. Can anyone who worked at grove comment on this? IRC is rock solid, so I don't understand how it could have been made so unstable? Did you guys have to implement your own IRC server in order to incorporate some Grove features?
dualogy 14y ago
Grove St. OGs fo'life, homies, fo'life!
kevinprince 14y ago
This really should be sold as a chat for your business which just happens to use IRC underneath.
arunagarwal 14y ago
checkout this new upcoming thingy.. https://catchuphere.com/pages/beta https://catchuphere.com/pages/beta

93 points by jacobian 14y ago

Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgrove.io%2Fblog%2Fgrove-here-stay http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

thedjpetersen 14y ago

Congratulations to the Grove.io team! Its great that this product is able to keep going. I have been following Grove.io pretty closely. This is a subject that is fairly interesting to me and compelled me to look at some of the different open source options[0], as they do exist for teams that are able to run their own chat. I decided to write my own chat client with a fellow HNer called Subway[1], since I could not find a good open source web client that persisted a connection while a user was offline. After I started I found another large project that more or less accomplishes the same thing called Alice[2] written in Perl. Both these clients have more or less the same goal to persist your connection while you are offline. For those interested in a paid alternative to grove there is also IRCCloud[3] which accomplishes the same thing. [0] http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/ http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/ [1] https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway [2] https://github.com/leedo/alice https://github.com/leedo/alice [3] https://irccloud.com/ https://irccloud.com/

stephen_mcd 14y ago
Here's my own one I recently built: https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views around it. Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket. On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.
yb66 14y ago
What would a persistent connection do for me if I'm offline? (honest question)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

seryl 14y ago

"Grove is here to stay"... clicks link > curl -i https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Server: nginx/1.1.17 Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:33:13 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 193 Connection: close <html> <head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx/1.1.17</center> </body> </html> Well, hopefully they get it on it's feet again. But it's good to hear!

frankwiles 14y ago

Yeah apparently the blog wasn't up to HN level traffic! I'll get that sorted out asap!

dchuk 14y ago

When I clicked this, I assumed it was going to be Grove going back on their statement that they were closing down, and I was concerned. That sort of wavering doesn't bode well for customer trust. In a weird way, I'm glad someone else is in charge not because the Grove team was bad, but from a PR perspective this just looks good.

hnuser100 14y ago

500 Internal Server Error nginx/1.1.17

aggronn 14y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am. $10/month for 5 users on IRC? This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service. I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.

mibbitier 14y ago
Imagine if they did it for email... "Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails." As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.
- asdf333 14y ago
  not everyone wants to worry about managing a vps. you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.
simonw 14y ago
"Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo" If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL. Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.
- problemdomain 14y ago
  It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month. I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous. Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.

jslatts 14y ago

Sorry. We already moved to flowdock (https://www.flowdock.com https://www.flowdock.com). Turns out its about 1000x more appropriate for us anyway as a central dev status hub. I would encourage any dev team who was using grove.io to check it out. IRC client compatible!

zalzane 14y ago

Wow, check out that pricing. What a fucking disaster. 5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user) 10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user) 20 users for 50$/mo (2.5$/user) 50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user) I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a service.

thibaut_barrere 14y ago
I know a good bunch of 2 to 5 sized companies that would pay for that, all highly competent people (and able to do that themselves). They are just "outsourcing" the low-value stuff in favor of their core business.
- zalzane 14y ago
  For a 2 to 5 size company, I don't see why they don't just use a public IRC server and set mode +irsp to a private channel.
  - thibaut_barrere 14y ago
    Because some businesses just won't use a public IRC server for various policy reasons (including policies required by their own customers), while using a paid server from a third party could be accepted. That's just one example.
    - problemdomain 14y ago
      That's the intersection of the following sets: * Small companies. * With some legal or contractual obligation preventing use of a public IRC server. * But not preventing use of a third-party outside-the-firewall solution. * And not having any criteria for the third-party, such as HIPAA compliance, warranties/guarantees, etc. Seems a pretty small set... Interestingly, grove doesn't seem to promise not to disclose the archives of your "private" server at all. Lots of ass-covering in their Terms of Service in favor of grove, and they have a privacy policy pertaining to their website, but nothing I could find about not telling the world whatever you happen to send their IRC servers.

mutru 14y ago

And https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/ is still going to be around, with way better reliability, IRC support, more and better integrations & much more. :) A Grove.io importer was also added yesterday: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-account-into-flowdock/ http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-acc...

martindale 14y ago
This is awesome, but appears to be broken right now.
- mutru 14y ago
  If you think you've found a bug, please let us know by tweeting or emailing team@, and we'll get it fixed. We haven't had downtime in 2 months, so I'm curious what seemed to be broken.

Karunamon 14y ago

I never understood the pricing. IRC Servers are completely free and dead simple to set up. $10 a month for a room limited to 5 users for just a pretty frontend to IRC? Why does this exist?

ascendant 14y ago
You've just described almost every modern Internet-enabled convenience built on decades-old protocols. I suppose if people followed your line of thinking we'd still be doing command-line everything. I'm not very excited by that prospect and glad that not everyone shares your viewpoint on what's valuable and what's not.
Karunamon 14y ago
To the one reply to this: You've been hellbanned - sorry guy. I see some great stuff in your comment history, apparently some overzealous idiot of a mod didn't like that you posted that article on controlling a forum.

endlessvoid94 14y ago

It's unbelievable how many haters there are. Unbelievable.

dustywusty 14y ago

Interestingly, their email lacked an unsubscribe link.

frankwiles 14y ago
That's a big oversight, email me frank@revsys.com and I'll make sure you don't receive anymore email. I hate that shit, our bad.

apiengine 14y ago

I love Grove.io, works for geeks and regular users and easy webhooks. My channel has everything I want and I've never spent longer than a few minutes configuring things.

ryanwaggoner 14y ago

In this thread: software developers who make $1xx / hr complain about paying a monthly fee that's worth less than the time it took to write the comments in question. Makes me glad I don't sell to software developers.

hogu 14y ago

We already moved to flowdock, it seems better so far, primarily because it's STABLE! When I used grove, the web client was basically unuseable, and even our IRC clients got disconnected periodically. The worse part is, the IRC disconnect was often times silent - as in, you would think that you were signed in, but none of your messages were sent, or you wouldn't actually receive messages. Presence in IRC (the users that it showed as being in the room) would become out of date quickly, and I frequently reconnected just to get an updated list of who was available. Can anyone who worked at grove comment on this? IRC is rock solid, so I don't understand how it could have been made so unstable? Did you guys have to implement your own IRC server in order to incorporate some Grove features?

dualogy 14y ago

Grove St. OGs fo'life, homies, fo'life!

kevinprince 14y ago

This really should be sold as a chat for your business which just happens to use IRC underneath.

arunagarwal 14y ago

checkout this new upcoming thingy.. https://catchuphere.com/pages/beta https://catchuphere.com/pages/beta