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I used IRC for over 10 years, but after using Slack for 1 it just felt outdated to me. Offline messages and simulatnous logins from multiple places are just two features I was missing in IRC and didn't even know till I had them, haha. But yeah, IRC networks just worked as message broker and not as databases, so I never thought about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's irccloud for that, or if you want to host yourself shout-IRC is really good.
irccloud keeps going down every time freenode netsplits. It got so bad lately I actually canceled my subscription and instead set up weechat+glowing bear, which is not as polished, but it works fairly well on both desktop and mobile. (And cheaper) It's also free software and easy to set up so I encourage everybody to check it out.
I am very glad this is happening. IRC was one of the first applications I started using on the internet. These days it nearly disappeared because of closed silos like Facebook, Twitter and Slack. This effort could help bring back a decentralized service that is not under the control of any single company.
I don't feel like typing much because it's nap time but IRCv3 is an almost closed group of friends, mostly znc core developers, who have decided they can choose what the future of IRC looks like. They have put lots of pressure on and harassed other developers of clients and networks, sending them patches and infiltrating their devs if necessary, so their ideas are actually implemented. If you complain about those ide…
How exactly does this work? Someone starts contributing to your project and it's an "infiltration"?
I used IRC for over 10 years, but after using Slack for 1 it just felt outdated to me. Offline messages and simulatnous logins from multiple places are just two features I was missing in IRC and didn't even know till I had them, haha. But yeah, IRC networks just worked as message broker and not as databases, so I never thought about it.
Also not being able to see or search chat history was a deal breaker for IRC. It's like the days before answering machines...
My favourite bit is how they skipped adding length negotiation and it is causing them problems already. See the brief discussion of size limit on http://ircv3.net/specs/core/message-tags-3.2.html Adding tags forced them to increase message length because of how IRC messages are hilariously limited to 512 bytes in all directions. In the existing protocol you already have to guess how long your messages are allowed to…
People assume that IRC as a protocol is not fantastically outdated and it's architecture is inherently distributed and fault tolerant. Even if those things are not really true (at least not at the levels that other moder modern systems would be considered at), people hold onto the belief.
I don't feel like typing much because it's nap time but IRCv3 is an almost closed group of friends, mostly znc core developers, who have decided they can choose what the future of IRC looks like. They have put lots of pressure on and harassed other developers of clients and networks, sending them patches and infiltrating their devs if necessary, so their ideas are actually implemented. If you complain about those ide…
Historically the IRCv3 project originated at Atheme as a project to bring some extensions to IRC in order to make it more modernized, such as the SASL binding (IRC Authentication Layer). ZNC guys and Atheme guys did not get along because political reasons, so they threatened to fork the project. Atheme decided to spin off the IRCv3 project at that time as it was no longer really interesting to Atheme anyway (IAL was adopted in basically every IRCd and most mainstream clients).
While I cannot really comment on the current managerial processes of the project (as I do not know what internal discussions the technical board has anymore, if any), the technical board allows people to submit things that they know will never ever be ratified, without saying what the outcome will be when it is already known to them, in order to give the appearance that they are an open project. In fact, advising people to not work on specifications that mainstream vendors will not adopt is actively discouraged by the working group, as the image of being open and the appearance of being non-offensive is more important than discouraging people from wasting their time.
As for charybdis (a widely deployed IRC server): we keep an eye on the IRCv3 group and implement things that we find interesting. There is no commitment from us to implement future IRCv3 work just because it is an IRCv3 specification.
As for IRC itself: IRC is a wonderful thing, but honestly in 2016 we can do much better. The backwards compatibility requirement of IRCv3 (which exists because they do not feel they have enough influence yet) is a serious crutch that prevents a lot of potential work for fixing design problems with IRC. The lack of unique identifiers at the client level (other than nickname) makes a lot of things like nickname ownership painful. The overall concept of IRC is a powerful one, but the technical foundation is crap. This is why Slack, gitter.im, etc are kicking IRC's ass right now, and IRCv3 is honestly too little too late for that fight. These services offer easy integration with any type of website and the IRCv3 group is too busy talking about bringing HSTS to IRC. This is a total and complete inversion of priorities verses where they should be.
My favourite bit is how they skipped adding length negotiation and it is causing them problems already. See the brief discussion of size limit on http://ircv3.net/specs/core/message-tags-3.2.html Adding tags forced them to increase message length because of how IRC messages are hilariously limited to 512 bytes in all directions. In the existing protocol you already have to guess how long your messages are allowed to…
Length negotiation has been discussed for years, but it’s not that easy. Imagine user A negotiates a length fo 1024 bytes with the server, user B negotiates a length of 2048 bytes. User B sends a message via the server to user A. What happens?
I don't feel like typing much because it's nap time but IRCv3 is an almost closed group of friends, mostly znc core developers, who have decided they can choose what the future of IRC looks like. They have put lots of pressure on and harassed other developers of clients and networks, sending them patches and infiltrating their devs if necessary, so their ideas are actually implemented. If you complain about those ide…
> infiltrating their devs if necessary How exactly does this work? Someone starts contributing to your project and it's an "infiltration"?
This in combination with the marketing efforts of the IRCv3 group places large amounts of pressure to just accept and maintain the patch in order to ensure that you wind up on their list of recommended software to use, instead of their advocacy of using a different software which has added the patches.
Why isn't encryption baked in by default? It's optional from what I can tell. I don't know how you can design a new protocol and not include encryption.
IRC was new in 1988. It's 28 years old protocol now.