71–80 of 499 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The things slack can do (at least according to this article) that IRC can't are do small it's negligible. If slack is web-based, then what is to stop someone from making a web-based IRC client with all the features and good UX design of slack?
And there is: http://shout-irc.com IMO Shout is a UI improvement over Slack for the sheer fact that it is 100% customizable.
Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.
http://www.tricksofthetrades.net/2015/09/10/slack-irssi-conn...
I feel like that has to diminish the walled-garden, proprietary weight at least a little bit if slack & irssi can communicate. And it works over SSL too. Once I started doing that, I didn't mind using slack. You have to "/ignore" certain server messages though or your whole screen will be spammed with them and you'll barely see the stuff people are saying.
Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.
Agreed, but with that said ... IRC has serious issues, and dancing around them or pretending they're not there is not helping. I talk a bit about them here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB... The reason Slack exists and can be so successful yet entirely proprietary is a symptom that IRC is not good enough and that has to be fixed. It is the manifestation of the papercuts we, IRC users, ha…
> Problems with IRC that Slack solves Main thing that Slack solves as far as I'm concerned is a great and uniform client on every platform. Don't get me wrong, I love irc. This is where I started learning everything I know about computer. I tried many times to get various team on it and it always failed. I think it's mainly because the learning curve is too big for non-technical/busy people, and that there's no good…
Both the linked article and the various suggestions in comments give all sorts of IRC-based alternatives to what Slack does, but they're all things that, let's be honest, require a lot more work to set up and are often far more fiddly to use. "Oh, this is easy, just run daemon X for this functionality and daemon Y for this functionality, and set them all up using stuff you can get here, here and here. Wait, that last one is out of date. Try using this gist instead. Okay, now, you can get that client-side feature you want if you switch to a different IRC client, use the following .config file, and look for the following plugins, although you'll probably want to change the defaults..."
Compare this to Slack, which for most users is: sign up, click here, and in Jeff Goldblum's words, "There is no step 3." From a practical standpoint you have to install zero new pieces of software (assuming you already have a browser), you have to edit zero fiddly text files, you need to install zero Perl scripts. Once your IRC is set up it seems "easy," but it's possible to spend an inordinate amount of time finding the answers not to questions like "how do I get snippet previews of links to show up in the client like it automatically does in Slack" (the answer is probably that you do not), but questions like "how do I get all the nicknames to show up in different colors?"
For certain FOSS projects, this may be less of an issue because the team may be more experienced in setting up frankly fiddly Unix software, and I think having an IRC channel is a good idea. It may be all you need; what Slack gives you above IRC is generally "nice to haves" rather than "must haves." But the FOSS crowd, to make a very rough generalization, often tends to deprioritize "nice to haves" to a point where they miss, well, just how nice it really is to have some of them.
IRC kind of sucks. The experience is worse. That's why people keep making these different tools - Campfire, HipChat, Slack. It's not just a technical thing. It's an experience thing. IRC is technically fine, just way too nerdy to be main line of business software these days.
What about gitter.im?
Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.
Agreed, but with that said ... IRC has serious issues, and dancing around them or pretending they're not there is not helping. I talk a bit about them here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB... The reason Slack exists and can be so successful yet entirely proprietary is a symptom that IRC is not good enough and that has to be fixed. It is the manifestation of the papercuts we, IRC users, ha…
If you're running your own irc server, you'll probably never notice anything. If you do, it's as simple as adding a server password (or maybe even changing the default port among some other settings), and anything unwanted will likely be a thing of the past (assuming you don't have dedicated people attacking you).
On your comment about IRC bots and services, networks don't see that as something that is up to them. If something requires a U:line or other network privileges, then it's up to the network staff to implement that, sure, but anything else is for their users to do. If IRC networks were for-profit, maybe you could expect them to have things like this and advertise how amazing all of their features are to potential clients. But IRC is nothing but a money sink for everyone involved, and there's therefore often little incentive for networks to implement and integrate a lot of bots and functionality that aren't integral to network operation.
Apart from this, spam is a really hard problem if there are resourceful people dedicated to it. Email has existed for even longer than IRC, and despite absurd amounts of work into anti-spam systems and functionality with it, it's not too surprising when spam manages to finds its way into your mailbox.
I still agree there's a lot of room for improvement, both at the protocol level and at the user level, though.
Have you ever noticed just how many open source projects are still using shitty software from the 90s? No doubt, some of that software is actually quite good but I will argue most of it exists primarily as a result of tradition. In other words: a lot of it isn't the best way to do things presently, and perhaps if we stopped using such mediums as: mailing lists, newsgroups, and IRC channels to run our open source projects then presumably our projects might be filled with more diverse people than dinosaurs that still roam our mailing lists.
I don't know why developers do this: but they assume because they have the skill to do just about anything with technology that other people who also have the skill ought to take the same time to do as they have. But honestly: even developer time is too valuable to waste on pointless shit. We ought to be trying to make things easier to use.