Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?
I use(d) IRCCloud. The paid version ($5/month) works very well too, as it also acts as a bouncer.
IRC turns thirty
181–190 of 232 posts
Re: IRC turns thirty
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ ). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.
The UI is the easiest thing to fix and as you have shown already has been for some time. What separates IRC and the rest is all the features you would expect by default in a messenger of the 21st century: - history - with search - logins - simple bots - automatic content fetching (wiki/youtube Links, pics and gifs) - file transfers that just work - image pasting - message editing And probably others. Yes, those featu…
To many, not having such features on IRC is a bonus.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most of the client protocol, it's just RFC 1459 and RFC 2812. Then there's CTCP, DCC, server-to-server protocols and the 005 numeric. I'm not sure you need any of these for communicating via telnet or writing a small bot that will answer back.
I tried to implement an IRC client in about 2004 and no popular server was implementing RFC 2812, which was released in 2000. I realise that's a long time ago but things move slowly in the IRC world, so I would be surprised if things had changed a lot since then.
RFC2812 was codifying one particular network's protocol choices and was never accepted by the wider community of IRC server and client developers.
There have been widely implemented improvements (eg RPL_ISUPPORT / 005) which succeeded by discussion and consensus rather than trying to lay down a new standard by fiat.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most of the client protocol, it's just RFC 1459 and RFC 2812. Then there's CTCP, DCC, server-to-server protocols and the 005 numeric. I'm not sure you need any of these for communicating via telnet or writing a small bot that will answer back.
Yes, you can definitely connect manually through telnet (I did it back in the old days). The only problem is it will not stay connected too much, because you should also reply to server's PINGs at regular time intervals otherwise you'll get disconnected.
With most servers you don't actually have to specifically reply to the PINGs, just sending something regularly should keep you connected.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#185If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also, any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?
For servers it depends. If you are going all-out, InspIRCd is what I roll. The only complaints I have with it are the massive config file (~2800 lines with the main config and the module config, more if you count the lesser files). The server for getting and going is UnrealIRCd, which is what I used to run. Solid and basic, just with a few less features. For clients, I use Hexchat, which ill fight for as the best gra…
I'm assuming you mean irssi, rather than ircii. ircii is super old and basically unused these days.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ ). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.
The UI is the easiest thing to fix and as you have shown already has been for some time. What separates IRC and the rest is all the features you would expect by default in a messenger of the 21st century: - history - with search - logins - simple bots - automatic content fetching (wiki/youtube Links, pics and gifs) - file transfers that just work - image pasting - message editing And probably others. Yes, those featu…
As a sidebar, from what I can tell the term "bot" for an automated agent accessible through chat originated on IRC.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ ). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.
IRC can't ever have authentication, because most clients won't support it. You can't have conversations that rely on rich text, code blocks with syntax highlighting, embedded images, or web previews: these things are possible (in some cases there's more than one way of doing them) but some users will always be using clients that don't support them, and will regard you as the problem if you try to create an expectatio…
Having to share Gists instead of inlining code blocks, and (of less importance) reaction gifs, was a huge non-starter.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#188Met 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…
I also met my Wife on IRC, ~20 years ago (after chatting for 2 years). Explaining then to people how we met was difficult, so we ended up just saying through a mutual friend - which was also true.
I strongly doubt it we would have met, in this day and age. The mainstream online socialising of today is superficial and desperate.
Today, a remote worker, I communicate with my colleagues over IRC. It's rare that I'd speak to a stranger on it.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like slack quite a bit, but it's not designed to be a replacement for general use case of IRC - it focuses on specific use cases and can be manhandled into other use cases with a lot of pain towards the users. matrix.org/riot.im seems like a more sensible alternative to IRC - but their systems are overloaded and slow - multi second latency is the norm.
The speed has gotten better recently. It usually sends messages in under 1 second. The UI is still a little laggy when switching tabs but everything is slowly getting more polished and faster.
Some time ago I tried to start a federated homeserver, connected to it and joined the main matrix channel (at the matrix server). Thirty seconds later (IIRC) my client (riot) gave up on the attempt. Nothing showed in the channel. I was told the servers (synapse) were syncing the required information. I checked the logs and, true, a lot of stuff was being sent back and forth.
One hour later, a lot of stuff was still being sent back and forth. I still could not join the channel, and there was still no user-friendly feedback on the failure.
These are fundamental flaws in usability and design that really need to be addressed before the system can gain more widespread acceptance. Have they since been corrected, or have improvements been made to mitigate them?
Re: IRC turns thirty
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
ftp is fringe because it's unencrypted and deals very poorly with NAT, and has performance/scaling issues for huge file transfers and transfers with huge numbers of discrete files. telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere. whereas irc daemons can easily be linked together by TLS1.2 and irc clients can also talk to servers over TLS.
Yeah, it’s easy to get nostalgic about old stuff, particularly when the old stuff was legit good. But man, FTP and telnet needed to die in a fire.
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