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

Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 222 posts

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#131

Post by Groxx »

mceachen wrote: post #105
Karunamon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mindset is alien to me. Humor is a generally positive thing and can't help but improve mental state while working.

> can't help but improve mental state Unless you regard it as inane. Throwing reaction gifs at a happy birthday/congratulation post is one thing. Throwing them into the oncall production ops channel and context switch everyone so they can see Homer back into a hedge is another.

>Throwing them into the oncall production ops channel and context switch everyone so they can see Homer back into a hedge is another.

This is part of the reason I like the "reactji" of slack / discord / etc. They don't cause a new message notification.

Because of that, they're less interruptive, and you can do some interesting, useful things. Like lightweight interaction - we "seed" an up/down arrow pair for voting, people just click one. Or controlling bots more easily - we use one to add Qs to a queue, others to shut them up when they're being noisy, or there's fancier options: https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-imm...

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#132

Post by simias »

abstractbeliefs wrote: post #95
superkuh wrote: post #52

It isn't that the features don't exist. I think most people on IRC just see the internet as their platform. Integrating image hosting into IRC seems absurd when there are perfectly good browsers and ways to host or self host images. Stuffing everything into one client, or worse, one corporation just restricts features and provides a single point of failure in both technical and censorship terms.

An example of how this could work is that a client could support receiving an image. When this happens, it could upload it to an image host of choice, get the url, and send that. It's what users already do, but without having to pop a new tab, head to imgur, upload the image, and copy paste it back etc.

I've scripted things like that in irssi the past (although using scp and one server I own, not imgur, but that shouldn't be massively harder). Most IRC clients are trivially scriptable.

I'm always baffled when I see that the Signal client package is like 80MB on desktop and lacks basic functionality and configurability while irssi is barely 1MB, extremely lightweight and effectively endlessly configurable. Let's not even talk about Discord which manages to lag severely in Firefox on my high-end gaming PC.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#133

Post by phicoh »

glacials wrote: post #124
maeln wrote: post #41

I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer r…

The author specifically calls out ephemerality as a feature of IRC. If it's easy to get history people will assume everyone is reading what they're typing. This would make people feel obligated to play catch-up every time they miss some messages due to being AFK or in the zone. By making history hard to obtain, IRC simulates real-world conversation -- you're either in the room or you're not.

And then lots of people have bouncers to be there 24x7.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#134

Post by josteink »

beefhash wrote: post #63
Pigo wrote: post #6

I'm glad Freenode has a user base for work related stuff, but I man do I miss when Undernet or Dalnet was still popular. I know I'll never run into my mother on IRC, and it is probably because of the format.

As an aside since you brought up Undernet: Their CService website[1] has been down for weeks now. As far as I know, that's the only way to even register with X. I'm not sure if this is being worked around, somehow, or if UnderNet is just being left to die. [1] https://cservice.undernet.org/

Undernet has always been flaky.

I help run a irc network which was spawned out of Undernet #linux around 15 years ago, because even back then we were really unhappy with general instability and how Undernet was run. Back then, it would split or simply go down several times a day.

We were making the claim that “Undernet is dying” even back then.

A few people and #linux channel-ops legitimately asked “How hard can it be?” and surprise surprise: not very.

So here we are 15 years later, aside from some very few incidents, with almost zero downtime.

Some servers has gone, some new have arrived. Same with oppers.

But the network is still there and all the same IRC-clients and users can still reach us.

IRC is one of the best things Internet has to offer, and these days people are working furiously to avoid learning what has made it so great.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#135

Post by npsimons »

Karunamon wrote: post #93
frou_dh wrote: post #88

Kooky "reaction GIFs" in work chat are so inane. I mean, there's certainly a time and a place for browsing funny GIFs on the web, but making it a first-class part of work chat is so juvenile it's unreal.

This mindset is alien to me. Humor is a generally positive thing and can't help but improve mental state while working.

> Humor is a generally positive thing and can't help but improve mental state while working.

Humor is subjective. All you have to do is reference "Office Space"'s "looks like somebody has a case of the Monday's!" scene to realize she thought it was funny, the "someone" did not.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#136

Post by crooked-v »

superkuh wrote: post #103
abstractbeliefs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of how this could work is that a client could support receiving an image. When this happens, it could upload it to an image host of choice, get the url, and send that. It's what users already do, but without having to pop a new tab, head to imgur, upload the image, and copy paste it back etc.

But why? Why add extra steps and add in having to keep the code to adapt to APIs or URL paths that change every 6 months? It's not like keeping a browser and IRC client open are mutually exclusive. I personally just $ cp whatever.jpg ~/www/ because I host my static site from my home connection and have for 20 years. I know self-hosting is not for everyone but everyone self hosting would literally solve all the proble…

"Just run your own home web server to share images in chat" is the kind of self-parodic response that's made Slack so successful in contrast.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#137

Post by lossolo »

KirinDave wrote: post #114
lossolo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If "we use plaintext passwords communicated to a faux user" is your idea of "solved" then we have very different standards. plaintext? In our use case TLS usage is mandatory and passwords are not stored in plaintext. I think your knowledge about how IRC is used now is a little outdated. > Congrats on being rich and lucky I guess? That's not a thing most folks can replicate at scale. I have had more than one IP addr…

> plaintext? TLS usage is mandatory and passwords are not stored in plaintext. I think your knowledge about how IRC is used now is a little outdated. Actually I wondered if that might be the case so I checked TFM: https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration Plaintext negotiation is my complaint. I doubt we'd be discussing this if it was plaintext storage. Not even the most fanatical IRC proponent would be okay with t…

> Actually I wondered if that might be the case so I checked TFM: https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration Plaintext negotiation is my complaint. I doubt we'd be discussing this if it was plaintext storage. Not even the most fanatical IRC proponent would be okay with that.

We are running our own IRC servers and you can't connect without using TLS, I still don't know what's your issue is with the registration ? You would need to have access to the machines that are running IRC servers to use that information. It's like saying that none of the standard authentication over the internet (login + password to your bank, your slack account, google cloud etc) using encrypted connection is not secure because you are entering password in plaintext.

> Where is your znc hosted? How much does it cost? Are you paying for a VPN service (please no)?

It's hosted at one of the largest datacenters in Europe. We are not using cloud. Cost is low, very low, compared to Google cloud/AWS we are paying around 50x times less for our whole infrastructure. But we digress now from the main discussion.

> Are you paying for a VPN service (please no)?

We are running our own VPN servers on dedicated hardware.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#139

Post by cwyers »

ganzuul wrote: post #119
KirinDave wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the dependence on a persistent connection itself is an absolute non-starter for this feature. It's statistically guaranteed to fail, and IRC as a protocol spec is powerless to do anything other than shrug.

Having been on IRC for maybe two decades now, I find the impermanence to be part of IRC's charm. People engage with you when you ask them what has been going on; just like in real life. It's a social protocol.

Certain use cases that Slack et al cater to, you might not get to choose impermanence. There might be compliance/regulatory issues that require you to have document retention policies.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#140

Post by asveikau »

ganzuul wrote: post #119
KirinDave wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the dependence on a persistent connection itself is an absolute non-starter for this feature. It's statistically guaranteed to fail, and IRC as a protocol spec is powerless to do anything other than shrug.

Having been on IRC for maybe two decades now, I find the impermanence to be part of IRC's charm. People engage with you when you ask them what has been going on; just like in real life. It's a social protocol.

But the lack of reliability I described a few comments up is not just a problem for 24/7 archiving. You will see it in everyday use: your connection will drop, it will take a while for a timeout to notice, and you will miss messages for that period.

Now in a real life situation you can mishear or fail to hear. But technology can make this better.

Post reply on HN