5 ms·

Why not just use IRC? Is it not made for the sole purpose of having lots of users talk with each other.

fredoliveira 11y ago
This is the real mystery here. I'm a huge fan of what Slack has done and was a big advocate for it when it was starting up. But it feels off that people with high realtime chat needs don't just use IRC, which has been around for ages, is super stable, and deals with this amount of users easily.
- detaro 11y ago
  Is there any web client you can easily deploy that comes close to Slack in comfort for the users? IRC is cool, but getting thousands of users comfortable with it sounds like quite a challenge.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    A number of people in my company use IRCCloud, which is a web-based client with mobile apps. It also has built in bouncer functionality - it stays logged in even when you don't have the page open.
    - Lazare 11y ago
      Have to second IRCCloud as being a great IRC client. That being said, their pricing is probably no better than Slack's for this purpose ($5/user/month).
      - jonty 11y ago
        IRCCloud staffer here! Glad you like it, this year is going to be a big one for us - we're actively looking at how we can better serve large open communities, and I would suspect that will result in some nice changes to both free accounts and the pricing of paid accounts. If anybody is interested in making IRC suck less, we've got a designer-shaped hole that needs filling... https://www.irccloud.com/jobs https://www.irccloud.com/jobs
        tperson 11y ago
        I think IRCCloud is really neat and as soon as the BNC comes along you got my money. Till then I'm hosting my own with ZNC, I just can't give up my weechat client, love it too much.
  - dsacco 11y ago
    We run our entire real-time communication infrastructure on an internal IRC server with ZNC. We have literally everyone in the company on it in various rooms, from #backend to #support; engineers and HR alike. I don't think it takes much to be comfortable with IRC, given the huge mix of people we have using it every day successfully. The IRC clients are really good at making users feel at home - Textual is set up for everyone in the company, although some people prefer to use Weechat.
  - ex3ndr 11y ago
    You can try to use ours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243
mtrpcic 11y ago
I agree that IRC would have been a good fit, and with modern IRC clients like LimeChat and Slate, it's not the "legacy" experience a lot of people remember. IRC also would solve all of the problems this guy faced: * Free. You can hop onto an existing tech-focused server like Freenode, or if you want your own control, throw it on your own server(s) for pennies. If you do the latter, you have full control over all logging. * Logging. Every client can choose what they want to log, what format the logs are in, where the logs live, etc. No more archived messages. Some IRC clients are smart enough to pull from the log to "back-fill" the messages. * Modern Clients. Like a said above, LimeChat is a really nice IRC client. It doesn't have all the features of Slack, but do you really need all the features of slack? * Bot Surplus. There are hundreds of bots written for IRC, in nearly every conceivable language. This was the first "integration" anyone ever used for chatting, and can integrate with anything if you put the time in. You don't get it for free, but for a community focused on programming, that's not the worst thing.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  The slow demise of IRC is sad. Clients like WeeChat excel on the text side of things, but where's the knockout web, desktop and mobile client? Something with the UI of Gitter would go far. I always feel like IRC is a few protocol extensions and a few clients away from being relevant again. /me goes back to Freenode
  - Lazare 11y ago
    I think IRCCloud has a UI significantly better than Gitter. (Then again, I'm not a fan of Gitter's UI, at least as far as their desktop OS X client goes...)
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    I'm happy IRC is dying, because it's a giant attack surface. As a hosting provider sysadmin, dealing with IRC servers was among the absolute worst parts of my job -- mitigating DDoS attacks against them, extensive hacking attempts directed at their infrastructure and later, mine, when they couldn't get in, credit card fraud associated with the accounts, IRC networks designed specifically for command and control of botnets and trafficking in child pornography, FBI raids against said networks we hadn't yet discovered... There are exceptions, like OFTC, but merely waltzing into the wrong place on EFnet these days is enough to get 10+ Gbit of UDP traffic directed at your IP address. I used to be fairly okay bouncing on a vhost, but now even the 12-year-olds have enough traffic to knock over a 40 Gbit port channel. An increasing number of datacenters are just filtering 6667. I'm on board with that. Seriously, let IRC relegate itself to the dark corners of the Internet on shitty hosts and stay there, IMO.
joshstrange 11y ago
IRC servers are easy to start up but managing them is not a piece of cake. Also clients aren't that great and features like chat sync all have to be built on top of IRC and have no standard implementation. It has similar issues to jabber which "supports" group chat but I've yet to come across a client that exposes this into something as nice as IRC/Slack/Hipchat/etc rooms.
zak_mc_kracken 11y ago
irc supports pretty much nothing besides text. With Slack, you can format, highlight code, upload pictures and documents, it supports Google Docs out of the box, there are plugins for Trello, git, and who knows what else. And it works flawlessly on all mobile OS (good luck getting a decent irc client running on iOS). irc is a dinosaur compared to what recent team communication software like Slack and Hipchat can do.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Although I don't necessarily disagree with you, none of these things are particularly difficult to implement. In fact, most of it could be done very easily if you had a client that could render/inject markdown. Git and trello bots are very easy to write -- almost kata level scope. Famous last words, but surely this is not hard given that there are 3rd party libraries for everything you need... I'm almost tempted...

This is the real mystery here. I'm a huge fan of what Slack has done and was a big advocate for it when it was starting up. But it feels off that people with high realtime chat needs don't just use IRC, which has been around for ages, is super stable, and deals with this amount of users easily.

detaro 11y ago
Is there any web client you can easily deploy that comes close to Slack in comfort for the users? IRC is cool, but getting thousands of users comfortable with it sounds like quite a challenge.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  A number of people in my company use IRCCloud, which is a web-based client with mobile apps. It also has built in bouncer functionality - it stays logged in even when you don't have the page open.
  - Lazare 11y ago
    Have to second IRCCloud as being a great IRC client. That being said, their pricing is probably no better than Slack's for this purpose ($5/user/month).
    - jonty 11y ago
      IRCCloud staffer here! Glad you like it, this year is going to be a big one for us - we're actively looking at how we can better serve large open communities, and I would suspect that will result in some nice changes to both free accounts and the pricing of paid accounts. If anybody is interested in making IRC suck less, we've got a designer-shaped hole that needs filling... https://www.irccloud.com/jobs https://www.irccloud.com/jobs
      - tperson 11y ago
        I think IRCCloud is really neat and as soon as the BNC comes along you got my money. Till then I'm hosting my own with ZNC, I just can't give up my weechat client, love it too much.
- dsacco 11y ago
  We run our entire real-time communication infrastructure on an internal IRC server with ZNC. We have literally everyone in the company on it in various rooms, from #backend to #support; engineers and HR alike. I don't think it takes much to be comfortable with IRC, given the huge mix of people we have using it every day successfully. The IRC clients are really good at making users feel at home - Textual is set up for everyone in the company, although some people prefer to use Weechat.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  You can try to use ours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243

mtrpcic 11y ago

I agree that IRC would have been a good fit, and with modern IRC clients like LimeChat and Slate, it's not the "legacy" experience a lot of people remember. IRC also would solve all of the problems this guy faced: * Free. You can hop onto an existing tech-focused server like Freenode, or if you want your own control, throw it on your own server(s) for pennies. If you do the latter, you have full control over all logging. * Logging. Every client can choose what they want to log, what format the logs are in, where the logs live, etc. No more archived messages. Some IRC clients are smart enough to pull from the log to "back-fill" the messages. * Modern Clients. Like a said above, LimeChat is a really nice IRC client. It doesn't have all the features of Slack, but do you really need all the features of slack? * Bot Surplus. There are hundreds of bots written for IRC, in nearly every conceivable language. This was the first "integration" anyone ever used for chatting, and can integrate with anything if you put the time in. You don't get it for free, but for a community focused on programming, that's not the worst thing.

voltagex_ 11y ago
The slow demise of IRC is sad. Clients like WeeChat excel on the text side of things, but where's the knockout web, desktop and mobile client? Something with the UI of Gitter would go far. I always feel like IRC is a few protocol extensions and a few clients away from being relevant again. /me goes back to Freenode
- Lazare 11y ago
  I think IRCCloud has a UI significantly better than Gitter. (Then again, I'm not a fan of Gitter's UI, at least as far as their desktop OS X client goes...)
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  I'm happy IRC is dying, because it's a giant attack surface. As a hosting provider sysadmin, dealing with IRC servers was among the absolute worst parts of my job -- mitigating DDoS attacks against them, extensive hacking attempts directed at their infrastructure and later, mine, when they couldn't get in, credit card fraud associated with the accounts, IRC networks designed specifically for command and control of botnets and trafficking in child pornography, FBI raids against said networks we hadn't yet discovered... There are exceptions, like OFTC, but merely waltzing into the wrong place on EFnet these days is enough to get 10+ Gbit of UDP traffic directed at your IP address. I used to be fairly okay bouncing on a vhost, but now even the 12-year-olds have enough traffic to knock over a 40 Gbit port channel. An increasing number of datacenters are just filtering 6667. I'm on board with that. Seriously, let IRC relegate itself to the dark corners of the Internet on shitty hosts and stay there, IMO.

joshstrange 11y ago

IRC servers are easy to start up but managing them is not a piece of cake. Also clients aren't that great and features like chat sync all have to be built on top of IRC and have no standard implementation. It has similar issues to jabber which "supports" group chat but I've yet to come across a client that exposes this into something as nice as IRC/Slack/Hipchat/etc rooms.

zak_mc_kracken 11y ago

irc supports pretty much nothing besides text. With Slack, you can format, highlight code, upload pictures and documents, it supports Google Docs out of the box, there are plugins for Trello, git, and who knows what else. And it works flawlessly on all mobile OS (good luck getting a decent irc client running on iOS). irc is a dinosaur compared to what recent team communication software like Slack and Hipchat can do.

mikekchar 11y ago
Although I don't necessarily disagree with you, none of these things are particularly difficult to implement. In fact, most of it could be done very easily if you had a client that could render/inject markdown. Git and trello bots are very easy to write -- almost kata level scope. Famous last words, but surely this is not hard given that there are 3rd party libraries for everything you need... I'm almost tempted...