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Simplicity of IRC

susam.net

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#61

Post by mcfedr »

c0l0 wrote: post #10

A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of…

I've not used teams, but both slack and Google chat make it very easy to post messages, a simple curl call has often been more than enough in lots of scripts

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#62

Post by crest »

michaelt wrote: post #50
lambdaba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%, the fact that you can literally pipe some data in a command-line IRC client is 1000x more conducive to such tweaking than using custom APIs/SDKs long live the Unix model!

Doesn't that mean you get a channel join/leave for almost every message?

So clients can read lines from a pipe as stdin.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#63

Post by mrweasel »

anthk wrote: post #55
stavros wrote: post #3

Same with SMTP and POP, I would routinely send or get email via telnet when I wanted to debug or delete some messages. They're all very simple protocols.

Usenet too. Getting news and discuss stuff "offline" and fetching/sending the messages once a week it's magical and resting.

The fall of Usenet more and more looks like a mistake. I’d love to have hyper-localized newsgroups, in place of Facebook.

Often local stuff like: “Why does is smell like somethings on fire”, “Has the water been turned of” or is “Is soccer cancelled this week?” is only posted on Facebook. So if you don’t have Facebook, you can’t get those information. Then again the Facebook algorithm will hide it for three weeks before deciding that you need to know that the hot water will be turned of for quarter of the town at three o’clock.

I feel that Usenet would be ideal for this.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#64

Post by cout »

DogLover_ wrote: post #59

I used IRC for gaming around 2004 - fond memories! I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.

An IRC network can have thousands of channels; a discord server typically has dozens.

Think of a discord channel as a permanent thread or a topic and a discord server like an irc channel. I find discord's model more manageable than irc for a large number of users; irc channels become a mess around 50-100 active users. Dividing the conversations into topics helps a lot.

(I have been using irc since around 1994 and am still somewhat active.)

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#65

Post by tomsmeding »

Nemi wrote: post #54
c0l0 wrote: post #10

A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of…

I tend to agree. I have the same reservations with HTTP2 to a lesser degree. I won’t deny that the complexity added by HTTP2 will greatly improve speeds in certain cases, and this may very well be needed to keep the greater interwebs working at comfortable speeds moving forward, but a part of me is greatly saddened by losing the sheer simplicity that is HTTP1.1.

Are we going to lose the simplicity of HTTP/1.1? I think that would only happen when we get servers that support only HTTP/2, and I hope those will be limited to hobbyist use for a while yet.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#66

Post by akpa1 »

DogLover_ wrote: post #59

I used IRC for gaming around 2004 - fond memories! I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.

Discord does allow you to set notifications across an entire community to "all messages" (which is the default), "only mentions" or "nothing" if you right-click on the community icon.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#67

Post by lewiscollard »

iqanq wrote: post #4

>I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how that has fostered creativity in the lives of young programmers growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s. For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be our first non-trivial hobby programming project that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users. W…

I dunno, I was there in the very early 2000s and as I remember it, for the subset of programmers I knew on IRC at the time, it was as Susam says: writing a shitty IRC bot - not a script, something from "scratch" that actually spoke the IRC protocol - was almost a rite of passage back then. From rose-tinted me-tinted glasses, I seem to remember that IRC-bot-related questions were a plurality of the questions asked in #vb on Dalnet back in the day!

You are also right to some extent as well; I wonder how much mIRC scripting has been underestimated as the gateway drug to programming for thousands.

(Rose-tinted/me-tinted disclaimer: the first non-trivial program I wrote was an IRC quote bot, in Visual Basic. I later rewrote it into Python, because I wanted to learn Python, which eventually led to my day job today...)

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#68

Post by igetspam »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #26
trixie_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The integrations are a neat trick, but often end up spamming a channel where people are trying to communicate. Teams seamlessly works across platforms, and mobile with video chat, files, outlook integration, and screen sharing. Maybe IRC could of been that, but it never happened.

It did happen, though. Just not in the same way. When it gets to the point where notifications are too spammy, it's very very easy to direct things to use a different channel and it works at huge scale. Anyone who uses IRC more than casually via some web portal is capable of being in more than one channel at a time. Google SRE still uses IRC internally specifically because it always just works and does what people ne…

I find that the "fat" clients encourage bad behavior that IRC used to allow people to handle independently. Examples:

* bot spam that I can't /ignore

* "inviting" people to channels tht you can't opt out of (invite is slack terms is yank. there is not option to say no)

* inline sharing of screenshots of article snippets that support an argument but not sharing links to the source material

* so... many... channels...

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#69

Post by open-source-ux »

IRC might be designed around a simple protocol, but it is not simple in operation. The plethora of command line options explains why IRC is only loved by (some) developers and nobody else.

I suspect some IRC users like the high barrier to entry (but would never admit to it): it keeps out all those clueless 'non-technical' users.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#70

Post by grishka »

DogLover_ wrote: post #59

I used IRC for gaming around 2004 - fond memories! I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.

Discord is horrible and I don't understand why so many people like it so much.

First thing I do when joining a new "server" is to mute all and any broadcast (@everyone/@here/roles) mentions. Broadcast mentions should have never been invented.

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