7 ms·

IRCCloud

112 points by jacobr 13y ago

TylerE 13y ago
Seems to be missing the one feature I'd actually want - IRC server emulation so I can connect via my normal IRC client.
- pearkes 13y ago
  This is a shameless plug, but with IRCRelay[1] we focus on the "I want to use my client" crowd. It seems to be a different group of IRC users (also, IRCCloud I think is a fair bit larger and more successful then us) but we have been running in that niche for a year and a bit and it's been going well. We were on the HN frontpage when we first launched[2]. It went ok, but we got a strong message that we needed a free plan. After holding out for a year, we've finally added one. You should try it out! :) [1]: https://www.ircrelay.com/ https://www.ircrelay.com/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877626
  - BinaryBrainz 13y ago
    I recently hopped on your service (found with a quick Google search) and it seems to work well and does exactly what I need it to do. I recently started getting big into the Freenode chatrooms for several projects hosted there and realized I needed to setup a bouncer again to catch some of the chatter that goes on during my offline hours. I'm glad your service was there to fill my need. One question: how do you compete with some of the other IRC bouncer services that seem to offer their bouncers for free? It seems like there are at least a couple that are running on just donations (found with the same search 'irc bouncer hosting').
    - pearkes 13y ago
      Hopefully not too late but: I think it comes down to reliability. We offer a service with very little downtime (only a few hours in 2013 during a large, planned transition we were doing). Additionally, we do a lot of support for folks, usually with fast response times. I've talked to a few folks coming from community hosted bouncers and I hear, anecdotally, stuff in line with the above.
- Viper007Bond 13y ago
  Check out ZNC. I run it on my server and proxy my connections to IRC through it. It'll play back messages when I reconnect, etc.
LukeHoersten 13y ago
This is actually fairly old. I used it a few years ago and it had some kind of memory leak or something in it's JS and would eventually stop working. Perhaps that's fixed now but I switched back to native clients as a result.
- mongrelion 13y ago
  Yes, I remember giving it a try when it got out but got very annoyed by the fact that after being open for a few hours or days it would make my Chrome very laggy and unresponsive. Then somebody told me that in Firefox it would resist more but it would just give it some more time gap but at last it was the same crap (and I was also leaving behind my favorite browser). Now I'm just all irssi + tmux and can't be more happy. I host my personal website (blog) and have a tmux + irssi 24/7 running on a DigitalOcean VPS for USD$5/mo. IRCCloud can't give me all that for so less money.
- jacobr 13y ago
  I signed up for an invite in 2011, and got it now, so this was the first time I got to finally try it. I did like it, it was worth the wait, so I submitted it here.
vinkelhake 13y ago
From the captain obvious department: you can get most (or all) of these features by running a terminal irc client like irssi or weechat in screen/tmux. That's what I've been using for the last 15 years or so. If you're not comfortable with terminal based clients, you can run a bouncer like znc and connect with your irc client of choice. But then again, if you're using IRC today then you probably have this figured out already.
- mongrelion 13y ago
  What you say is right: > you can get most (or all) of these features by running a terminal irc client like irssi or weechat in screen/tmux. But if you're an IRC newbie that is accessing some support channel on Freenode via web and discover that there are more channels related to the stuff you like (Ruby/Go/Erlang/pr0n/etc) and then you hear about IRCCloud then you think you're on the right path :) Not that I've been there. I'm just trying to put myself in somebody's shoes. Back in the days I tried ZNC and then switched to just screen (now tmux) + irssi. <3 So, yeah, don't be so tough with the guys that haven't yet heard of IRC and don't know what's going on lol.
- dysoco 13y ago
  Though you'd have to be 24/7 online to get notifications and logs, thus, needing a server.
  - aeroevan 13y ago
    I currently use an irssi plugin to send notifications to my glass when I'm offline :)
    - corin_ 13y ago
      Could any sentence combine old-school and new-school geekiness quite so well? I love it.
      - gfodor 13y ago
        Someone needs to hack together a gopher client for glass.
cjbprime 13y ago
Here's an open source competitor: https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
- ndesaulniers 13y ago
  And a much less feature complete: https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/fxos-irc https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/fxos-irc (100% client side, no websockets proxy or such) or better: http://firessh.net/ http://firessh.net/ (add-on)
  - Arelius 13y ago
    But the websockets proxy is the primary advantage.
- ecnahc515 13y ago
  Glad someone mentioned this. The creator DJ put a lot of work into this, and it works very well.
- glomph 13y ago
  Another open source alternative https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ (but it doesn't yet have persistence built in)
  - xt 13y ago
    Open source weechat web frontend: http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/ http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/
- aksx 13y ago
  i wish it could send push notifications to my phone.
bitcrusher 13y ago
Hmmm.. So this is a SaaS IRC bouncer, in a web-app, without the ability to use an actual IRC client. Seems too limited to be useful. Setting up an IRC server, with a bouncer on a $5/month droplet would be more useful.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  There is an Android IRC client that ties into this (it was the reason that I signed up for this service in the first place.. TapChat, I think?), but I'm unaware of any desktop versions.
- metabrew 13y ago
  We also have nice android and ios apps, with push notifications and synchronised read status. But we don't act as a traditional bouncer yet. Maybe in future.. it's all about the web app and mobile apps for the time being.
binaryatrocity 13y ago
http://quassel-irc.org/ http://quassel-irc.org/ I've been running Quassel-core on a linux-server and the client on all my endpoints and it works fantastically. Plus I am in control of everything. Replaced irssi+tmux for me instantly. From their website: "Quassel IRC is a modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client, meaning that one (or multiple) client(s) can attach to and detach from a central core -- much like the popular combination of screen and a text-based IRC client such as WeeChat, but graphical."
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jbergstroem 13y ago
A combo I recently moved to – after using 5+ years irssi, 5+ years weechat – is the graphical client Textual[1] (OS X only) backed by znc. It's smart enough to do replaying backlog and similar for you. I also really admire their licensing strategy. The entire project is open source; build it yourself or pay us to do it (then we'll throw in support as well)[2]. [1] http://www.codeux.com/textual/ http://www.codeux.com/textual/ [2] https://github.com/codeux/textual https://github.com/codeux/textual
- dewey 13y ago
  Agreed, Textual is easily the most used app I'm using on my Mac and together with ZNC and Palaver[1] as iOS client (with push) I couldn't be happier. [1] http://palaverapp.com/ http://palaverapp.com/
- pyre 13y ago
  In the copy on your front-page, I would say "Extendable" or "Extensible" instead of "Expandable" here: Expandable using scripts written in AppleScript, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, and Objective-C. It took me a second to figure out what you meant when I first read it. I initially read it in more of a Minimize/Expand sense. [Though maybe I'm just being pedantic.]
dijit 13y ago
Hey! my IRC network is on the default drop-down of this service, they're also based near me. As much as I love the interface and idea (I really do) and I love the App, for me as an operator it requires making large exceptions in my connection limiting. I usually only allow 25 connected users from a single IP, and I use GeoIP to get people a node near them- so- when people connect using irccloud they lose that benefit, and it means I have 100's of connections from ealing.irccloud.com- in the past there has also been some issue with availability, it's weird when netsplit like events happen and you have no control. (although I believe they fixed the issue with ddos) personally, I don't use irccloud day to day, I use xchat and 'Palaver' for iPhone, which my friend develops- he also maintains ZNC so his app has push notifications on highlight. (as long as you're not connected to ZNC or your client is marked 'Away') Everything of his is open source (except palaver I think, it's paid), so; if you're interested in IRC I'd take a poke. https://github.com/Palaver/znc-palaver https://github.com/Palaver/znc-palaver he also intends on making a web client, similar to irccloud, however he's terrible at design so don't hold your breath. https://github.com/Palaver/palaverweb https://github.com/Palaver/palaverweb
- metabrew 13y ago
  btw our preferred solution for the IP session limit is for everyone to hurry up and deploy IPv6 everywhere ;) Some ircds by default limit sessions per ipv6 /64, but that's easily changed if needed.
  - dijit 13y ago
    I have ipv6 on all my nodes, but we still get connections from a single outbound source.
    - metabrew 13y ago
      ah, perhaps the domain in our list doesn't have an AAAA record. let me know if you want us to update it. we always use ipv6 if an AAAA record exists, and fall back to v4 if that fails.
- ward 13y ago
metabrew 13y ago
Hi, one of the irccloud team. Can answer any questions if you like. Some info: * Erlang, haproxy, rabbitmq, redis, postgres, cassandra, chef * 10+ billion irc lines stored at the last count * Thousands of IPv6 IRC connections - we give each user their own IPv6 address. Main site also works over ipv6. * Thousands of IPv4 connections too * Open source android and ios apps: https://blog.irccloud.com/mobile-apps-open-sourced/ https://blog.irccloud.com/mobile-apps-open-sourced/ * API: https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview * Details on our security, password storage, etc: https://www.irccloud.com/privacy https://www.irccloud.com/privacy I've mentioned this on HN before, but we moved our hosting off Hetzner and on to Black Lotus for the ddos-protection. We see fairly frequent ddos attacks, from a few hundred mbit to 10+ gbit. They aren't impacting service since we moved to black lotus.
- alexpopescu 13y ago
  Can you share what you store in each of the databases? Here's what I'd speculate: - Redis: message lists for active users - Postgres: account details - Cassandra: all messages Thanks.
  - metabrew 13y ago
    Yep, postgres has all the account / user details, lists of what network and channels to join, billing etc. All the irc messages end up in cassandra, via rabbitmq. We use local redis as a cache for the most recent messages. Our cassandra cluster is on EC2 (~11ms away from our other hardware, which is in LA).
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Great, work, I tried it, got my invite and logged into my Freenode channels. Very nice!
- jacobr 13y ago
  Thanks. For me, it's only really useful with a backlog of perhaps 7 days, the rest I would like to have permanently deleted, it would make me feel more comfortable using the service.
leokun 13y ago
This didn't work for grove.io. Nobody pays money for IRC. There is a tiny, in the not worth it department, fraction of people willing to pay a couple of dollars for an IRC client. At best you could build something like HipChat or Olark using IRC as a backbone and hide all the complexity of it from the end user and maybe then you have a chance. Finally, less people are using IRC all the time. If you look at channels that have been around a long time, they've got less users than they used to.
- martindale 13y ago
  I pay money for grove.io. Not because it provides IRC, but because it provides a smooth, asynchronous communication tool for my team, and defers IRC to what it should be; a protocol.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Honest question: Why is IRC > XMPP?
    - dijit 13y ago
      Plain text vs rich text. as a result, despite the awesome features of XMPP, IRC is simply more extentable and easy to develop around- whilst also being basic to implement.
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        Thank you!
      - pyre 13y ago
        > whilst also being basic to implement Maybe it's changed, but I remember trying to communicate w/ IRC servers via telnet (prior to netcat) a while ago (maybe 8 years) and I do recall that most of them have deviated from the 'official' spec (specifically the initial connection handshake). I actually had a chat about this with the epic4 devs at the time. At least XMPP has an official spec. My impression of the IRC world is that it's a de-facto standard. Though there are many implementations that one can clean the details from, cracking open irssi-core to figure out what the protocol is seems a little more difficult than reading an RFC and dealing w/ XML (it's not like we don't have tools built around XML; I would lean heavily on XPath).
Morphling 13y ago
Looks cool, but you from what I gather you can get a service such as this running for free with just a little effort. Personally I use Irissi with an extension that pushes hilights to my phone and connecting via SSH isn't a big issue on any device.
jahaja 13y ago
I find IRC being perfect for a desktop app, when I tried this previously I just found myself constantly forgetting about it and closing it just as another tab. Anyway, it's a great service but I just can't get it to fit my usage pattern.
unethical_ban 13y ago
For anyone setting up a non-federated chat system, why not Mumble? Sure, it's primarily used for gaming, but the ability exists to use a text-based client, and everything is encrypted by default.
jimmaswell 13y ago
I just use remote desktop to my windows server.
Karunamon 13y ago
I love this just for the web UI, but it's impossible for me to justify $60 a year for that - the lion's share of the implementation can be had, without any such limits, by spending 10 minutes setting up ZNC on a free VPS.
arvindravi 13y ago
That certainly looks cool. Though, Recently I came across a similar site that provides the service for free. http://irc.lc/ http://irc.lc/ You connect to a server using http://irc.lc/<servername>/<channel> http://irc.lc/<servername>/<channel>, say like http://irc.lc/freenode/ruby http://irc.lc/freenode/ruby. Its pretty cool too, worth checking out.
rly_ItsMe 13y ago
What are the benefits of IRCCloud compared to a bouncer? I'm using my bouncer on for about 10 years now and never missed one line of chat in about 5 IRC Networks (Quakenet/ Freenode/ ETG/ Gamesurge/ OFTC).
cryptocoin 13y ago
OTR is missing, could you add it for PMs ?

IRCCloud

112 points by jacobr 13y ago

TylerE 13y ago

Seems to be missing the one feature I'd actually want - IRC server emulation so I can connect via my normal IRC client.

pearkes 13y ago
This is a shameless plug, but with IRCRelay[1] we focus on the "I want to use my client" crowd. It seems to be a different group of IRC users (also, IRCCloud I think is a fair bit larger and more successful then us) but we have been running in that niche for a year and a bit and it's been going well. We were on the HN frontpage when we first launched[2]. It went ok, but we got a strong message that we needed a free plan. After holding out for a year, we've finally added one. You should try it out! :) [1]: https://www.ircrelay.com/ https://www.ircrelay.com/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877626
- BinaryBrainz 13y ago
  I recently hopped on your service (found with a quick Google search) and it seems to work well and does exactly what I need it to do. I recently started getting big into the Freenode chatrooms for several projects hosted there and realized I needed to setup a bouncer again to catch some of the chatter that goes on during my offline hours. I'm glad your service was there to fill my need. One question: how do you compete with some of the other IRC bouncer services that seem to offer their bouncers for free? It seems like there are at least a couple that are running on just donations (found with the same search 'irc bouncer hosting').
  - pearkes 13y ago
    Hopefully not too late but: I think it comes down to reliability. We offer a service with very little downtime (only a few hours in 2013 during a large, planned transition we were doing). Additionally, we do a lot of support for folks, usually with fast response times. I've talked to a few folks coming from community hosted bouncers and I hear, anecdotally, stuff in line with the above.
Viper007Bond 13y ago
Check out ZNC. I run it on my server and proxy my connections to IRC through it. It'll play back messages when I reconnect, etc.

LukeHoersten 13y ago

This is actually fairly old. I used it a few years ago and it had some kind of memory leak or something in it's JS and would eventually stop working. Perhaps that's fixed now but I switched back to native clients as a result.

mongrelion 13y ago
Yes, I remember giving it a try when it got out but got very annoyed by the fact that after being open for a few hours or days it would make my Chrome very laggy and unresponsive. Then somebody told me that in Firefox it would resist more but it would just give it some more time gap but at last it was the same crap (and I was also leaving behind my favorite browser). Now I'm just all irssi + tmux and can't be more happy. I host my personal website (blog) and have a tmux + irssi 24/7 running on a DigitalOcean VPS for USD$5/mo. IRCCloud can't give me all that for so less money.
jacobr 13y ago
I signed up for an invite in 2011, and got it now, so this was the first time I got to finally try it. I did like it, it was worth the wait, so I submitted it here.

vinkelhake 13y ago

From the captain obvious department: you can get most (or all) of these features by running a terminal irc client like irssi or weechat in screen/tmux. That's what I've been using for the last 15 years or so. If you're not comfortable with terminal based clients, you can run a bouncer like znc and connect with your irc client of choice. But then again, if you're using IRC today then you probably have this figured out already.

mongrelion 13y ago
What you say is right: > you can get most (or all) of these features by running a terminal irc client like irssi or weechat in screen/tmux. But if you're an IRC newbie that is accessing some support channel on Freenode via web and discover that there are more channels related to the stuff you like (Ruby/Go/Erlang/pr0n/etc) and then you hear about IRCCloud then you think you're on the right path :) Not that I've been there. I'm just trying to put myself in somebody's shoes. Back in the days I tried ZNC and then switched to just screen (now tmux) + irssi. <3 So, yeah, don't be so tough with the guys that haven't yet heard of IRC and don't know what's going on lol.
dysoco 13y ago
Though you'd have to be 24/7 online to get notifications and logs, thus, needing a server.
- aeroevan 13y ago
  I currently use an irssi plugin to send notifications to my glass when I'm offline :)
  - corin_ 13y ago
    Could any sentence combine old-school and new-school geekiness quite so well? I love it.
    - gfodor 13y ago
      Someone needs to hack together a gopher client for glass.

cjbprime 13y ago

Here's an open source competitor: https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway

ndesaulniers 13y ago
And a much less feature complete: https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/fxos-irc https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/fxos-irc (100% client side, no websockets proxy or such) or better: http://firessh.net/ http://firessh.net/ (add-on)
- Arelius 13y ago
  But the websockets proxy is the primary advantage.
ecnahc515 13y ago
Glad someone mentioned this. The creator DJ put a lot of work into this, and it works very well.
glomph 13y ago
Another open source alternative https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ (but it doesn't yet have persistence built in)
- xt 13y ago
  Open source weechat web frontend: http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/ http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/
aksx 13y ago
i wish it could send push notifications to my phone.

bitcrusher 13y ago

Hmmm.. So this is a SaaS IRC bouncer, in a web-app, without the ability to use an actual IRC client. Seems too limited to be useful. Setting up an IRC server, with a bouncer on a $5/month droplet would be more useful.

Karunamon 13y ago
There is an Android IRC client that ties into this (it was the reason that I signed up for this service in the first place.. TapChat, I think?), but I'm unaware of any desktop versions.
metabrew 13y ago
We also have nice android and ios apps, with push notifications and synchronised read status. But we don't act as a traditional bouncer yet. Maybe in future.. it's all about the web app and mobile apps for the time being.

binaryatrocity 13y ago

http://quassel-irc.org/ http://quassel-irc.org/ I've been running Quassel-core on a linux-server and the client on all my endpoints and it works fantastically. Plus I am in control of everything. Replaced irssi+tmux for me instantly. From their website: "Quassel IRC is a modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client, meaning that one (or multiple) client(s) can attach to and detach from a central core -- much like the popular combination of screen and a text-based IRC client such as WeeChat, but graphical."

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jbergstroem 13y ago

A combo I recently moved to – after using 5+ years irssi, 5+ years weechat – is the graphical client Textual[1] (OS X only) backed by znc. It's smart enough to do replaying backlog and similar for you. I also really admire their licensing strategy. The entire project is open source; build it yourself or pay us to do it (then we'll throw in support as well)[2]. [1] http://www.codeux.com/textual/ http://www.codeux.com/textual/ [2] https://github.com/codeux/textual https://github.com/codeux/textual

dewey 13y ago
Agreed, Textual is easily the most used app I'm using on my Mac and together with ZNC and Palaver[1] as iOS client (with push) I couldn't be happier. [1] http://palaverapp.com/ http://palaverapp.com/
pyre 13y ago
In the copy on your front-page, I would say "Extendable" or "Extensible" instead of "Expandable" here: Expandable using scripts written in AppleScript, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, and Objective-C. It took me a second to figure out what you meant when I first read it. I initially read it in more of a Minimize/Expand sense. [Though maybe I'm just being pedantic.]

dijit 13y ago

Hey! my IRC network is on the default drop-down of this service, they're also based near me. As much as I love the interface and idea (I really do) and I love the App, for me as an operator it requires making large exceptions in my connection limiting. I usually only allow 25 connected users from a single IP, and I use GeoIP to get people a node near them- so- when people connect using irccloud they lose that benefit, and it means I have 100's of connections from ealing.irccloud.com- in the past there has also been some issue with availability, it's weird when netsplit like events happen and you have no control. (although I believe they fixed the issue with ddos) personally, I don't use irccloud day to day, I use xchat and 'Palaver' for iPhone, which my friend develops- he also maintains ZNC so his app has push notifications on highlight. (as long as you're not connected to ZNC or your client is marked 'Away') Everything of his is open source (except palaver I think, it's paid), so; if you're interested in IRC I'd take a poke. https://github.com/Palaver/znc-palaver https://github.com/Palaver/znc-palaver he also intends on making a web client, similar to irccloud, however he's terrible at design so don't hold your breath. https://github.com/Palaver/palaverweb https://github.com/Palaver/palaverweb

metabrew 13y ago
btw our preferred solution for the IP session limit is for everyone to hurry up and deploy IPv6 everywhere ;) Some ircds by default limit sessions per ipv6 /64, but that's easily changed if needed.
- dijit 13y ago
  I have ipv6 on all my nodes, but we still get connections from a single outbound source.
  - metabrew 13y ago
    ah, perhaps the domain in our list doesn't have an AAAA record. let me know if you want us to update it. we always use ipv6 if an AAAA record exists, and fall back to v4 if that fails.
ward 13y ago

metabrew 13y ago

Hi, one of the irccloud team. Can answer any questions if you like. Some info: * Erlang, haproxy, rabbitmq, redis, postgres, cassandra, chef * 10+ billion irc lines stored at the last count * Thousands of IPv6 IRC connections - we give each user their own IPv6 address. Main site also works over ipv6. * Thousands of IPv4 connections too * Open source android and ios apps: https://blog.irccloud.com/mobile-apps-open-sourced/ https://blog.irccloud.com/mobile-apps-open-sourced/ * API: https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview * Details on our security, password storage, etc: https://www.irccloud.com/privacy https://www.irccloud.com/privacy I've mentioned this on HN before, but we moved our hosting off Hetzner and on to Black Lotus for the ddos-protection. We see fairly frequent ddos attacks, from a few hundred mbit to 10+ gbit. They aren't impacting service since we moved to black lotus.

alexpopescu 13y ago
Can you share what you store in each of the databases? Here's what I'd speculate: - Redis: message lists for active users - Postgres: account details - Cassandra: all messages Thanks.
- metabrew 13y ago
  Yep, postgres has all the account / user details, lists of what network and channels to join, billing etc. All the irc messages end up in cassandra, via rabbitmq. We use local redis as a cache for the most recent messages. Our cassandra cluster is on EC2 (~11ms away from our other hardware, which is in LA).
rdtsc 13y ago
Great, work, I tried it, got my invite and logged into my Freenode channels. Very nice!
jacobr 13y ago
Thanks. For me, it's only really useful with a backlog of perhaps 7 days, the rest I would like to have permanently deleted, it would make me feel more comfortable using the service.

leokun 13y ago

This didn't work for grove.io. Nobody pays money for IRC. There is a tiny, in the not worth it department, fraction of people willing to pay a couple of dollars for an IRC client. At best you could build something like HipChat or Olark using IRC as a backbone and hide all the complexity of it from the end user and maybe then you have a chance. Finally, less people are using IRC all the time. If you look at channels that have been around a long time, they've got less users than they used to.

martindale 13y ago
I pay money for grove.io. Not because it provides IRC, but because it provides a smooth, asynchronous communication tool for my team, and defers IRC to what it should be; a protocol.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Honest question: Why is IRC > XMPP?
  - dijit 13y ago
    Plain text vs rich text. as a result, despite the awesome features of XMPP, IRC is simply more extentable and easy to develop around- whilst also being basic to implement.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Thank you!
    - pyre 13y ago
      > whilst also being basic to implement Maybe it's changed, but I remember trying to communicate w/ IRC servers via telnet (prior to netcat) a while ago (maybe 8 years) and I do recall that most of them have deviated from the 'official' spec (specifically the initial connection handshake). I actually had a chat about this with the epic4 devs at the time. At least XMPP has an official spec. My impression of the IRC world is that it's a de-facto standard. Though there are many implementations that one can clean the details from, cracking open irssi-core to figure out what the protocol is seems a little more difficult than reading an RFC and dealing w/ XML (it's not like we don't have tools built around XML; I would lean heavily on XPath).

Morphling 13y ago

Looks cool, but you from what I gather you can get a service such as this running for free with just a little effort. Personally I use Irissi with an extension that pushes hilights to my phone and connecting via SSH isn't a big issue on any device.

jahaja 13y ago

I find IRC being perfect for a desktop app, when I tried this previously I just found myself constantly forgetting about it and closing it just as another tab. Anyway, it's a great service but I just can't get it to fit my usage pattern.

unethical_ban 13y ago

For anyone setting up a non-federated chat system, why not Mumble? Sure, it's primarily used for gaming, but the ability exists to use a text-based client, and everything is encrypted by default.

jimmaswell 13y ago

I just use remote desktop to my windows server.

Karunamon 13y ago

I love this just for the web UI, but it's impossible for me to justify $60 a year for that - the lion's share of the implementation can be had, without any such limits, by spending 10 minutes setting up ZNC on a free VPS.

arvindravi 13y ago

That certainly looks cool. Though, Recently I came across a similar site that provides the service for free. http://irc.lc/ http://irc.lc/ You connect to a server using http://irc.lc/<servername>/<channel> http://irc.lc/<servername>/<channel>, say like http://irc.lc/freenode/ruby http://irc.lc/freenode/ruby. Its pretty cool too, worth checking out.

rly_ItsMe 13y ago

What are the benefits of IRCCloud compared to a bouncer? I'm using my bouncer on for about 10 years now and never missed one line of chat in about 5 IRC Networks (Quakenet/ Freenode/ ETG/ Gamesurge/ OFTC).

cryptocoin 13y ago

OTR is missing, could you add it for PMs ?