Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IRC turns thirty

oulu.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 232 posts

Re: IRC turns thirty

#141

Post by vesinisa »

sbjs wrote: post #62
donatj wrote: post #34

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

I tried it before and it's not as easy as it sounds. There is no one spec, it's a handful of RFCs and other ad hoc extensions that are barely documented anywhere. I think there's at least a dozen different documents you have to refer to.

For a simple client, the original RFC 1459 is still just enough.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#142

Post by bkircher »

xPaw wrote: post #132
bkircher wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. However simplicity is quite important when you choose IRC as company chat solution and you want not only your geeky devs to join but also not–so–geeky people like the guy from marketing and the friendly folks from the front–desk.

You only need to setup Lounge once, it supports multiple users at the same time. A non geeky person should have no trouble joining a channel.

Oh, wow. I see. With push notifications, mobile clients, TLS encryption this _could_ work in a company setting …provided you keep logs and make search results available for staff, too. Cool. Thanks for the links!

Re: IRC turns thirty

#143

Post by pen2l »

tapland wrote: post #99

Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lac…

> current toxicity of social media

The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat”

IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit.

There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing) it is not for the faint hearted.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#145

Post by anfilt »

pen2l wrote: post #143
tapland wrote: post #99

Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lac…

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

What channels are you using? Killing peoples spirit maybe once in a blue moon someone is rude. However, if anything I would say people are polite than they used to be. People still using IRC like IRC why would they want to actively harm the channels they use.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#146

Post by lrvick »

pen2l wrote: post #143
tapland wrote: post #99

Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lac…

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

Sounds like you might be blaming a protocol for some poor channel choices.

There are still plenty of educational/social IRC communities that welcome curious people of all skill levels.

I can vouch for https://hashbang.sh (irc.hashbang.sh/6697) which has piles of industry leaders as regulars that prefer investing in open federated standards for internet communication over the endless array of hip walled garden flavor of the week chat systems.

We give out free bouncers/shells to anyone too :)

Re: IRC turns thirty

#147

Post by rane »

movedx wrote: post #38
yeukhon wrote: post #23

I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main online network.

I used IRC Cloud for some time. Pretty good, actually. Works almost everywhere, nice UI. It's certainly no irssi in a tmux/screen, but it's pretty good. Costs $5/month when I was using it (so close to the same as a VPS or proxy.)

Running a weechat client on a ipv6, nat ipv4 VPS that costs me 3€/year. With weechat you also get a responsive web client for free through glowing-bear.org, so it's quite close to IRCCloud in the end.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#148

Post by another-cuppa »

donatj wrote: post #34

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

Before I had a home network or always-on internet connection I used to play with servers locally. I actually set up my own IRC network using unrealircd and learnt how to configure it etc. I don't know why but one day I decided to try to telnet into the IRC server and it blew my mind that it actually worked. You can do the same thing with an FTP server as well.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#149

Post by honestoHeminway »

ryanisnan wrote: post #36
superkuh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship. In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself). It is a zero-sum game…

Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. And no, we're not locked into anything.

I know several Open Source community where bots basically provide the whole additional services. PasteBin, Auto-Bug Attaching a IRC-Log to a bug report, Continous Integration Reports.. actually its easier to integrate into IRC at times.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#150

Post by another-cuppa »

unimpressive wrote: post #135
protomyth wrote: post #9

If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also, any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?

For Windows I always use Hexchat, which seems to be the only decent open source client for Windows. If anyone would like to jump in and point out others I don't know about, by all means. (Heck, it's what I use on Linux too)

Is unrealircd not decent? That's what I used to use.
Post reply on HN