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IRC is dead, long live IRC

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Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#141

Post by andyzweb »

jlgreco wrote: post #126
slowpoke wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily host and extend yourself? I don't get you people. I really don't get you.

I've just started writing it off as "Because startup!" . There really are just some protocols that don't need to be reinvented as companies. Yeah, twitter is better than finger, but IRC has proven itself.

>twitter is better than finger

sure if you enjoy proprietary walled gardens with uptime issues

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#142

Post by reinhardt »

slowpoke wrote: post #122
nso wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try getting them onboard with www.hipchat.com. Even tho I still use IRC at home we use hipchat at work, and it works pretty well. The ability to easily send screengrabs and similar stuff to other users is pretty handy.

Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily host and extend yourself? I don't get you people. I really don't get you.

I assume you also don't get people who use proprietary, hosted services to host (Github) and run (Heroku) their code, manage their projects (Jira), email (Sendgrid), forums (vBulletin), helpdesk (Zendesk) and a whole lot more.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#143

Post by clobber »

andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

> an office for startups

> The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.

Not shocked that a bunch of kids whose first experience with a computer was Windows XP and all trying to recreate facebook have never heard of IRC

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#144

Post by cdcarter »

One of the weirdest hold outs of IRC I know about is the collegiate academic competition (or quizbowl) community. Serious quizbowlers across the country still hang out in #quizbowl on Freenode every day, shooting the shit, discussing a novel or philosophical treatise, discussing tournament shortcomings, or just playing a round of the game, shoehorned into the IRC ecosystem. There's a great moment when you think that you buzzed in first, but really a netsplit is about to occur, and the moderator never even noticed you trying!

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#145

Post by bonch »

laumars wrote: post #73
lucian1900 wrote: post #9

It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time. Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

Having written an IRC client and several bots, I actually like the simplicity of the protocol.

Having also written a client, I have to disagree that the protocol is simple. The lack of standardized text encoding, the 512 message limit, the desync issue of RPL_NAMREPLY, the hundreds of differences between each network's server behavior, and more make it quite a pain to write a competitive client. It's so bad that the CAP/ACK was protocol was drafted to query the behavior of a server in a standardized way, in addition to RPL_ISUPPORT (which uses the 005 numeric in a way that conflicts with the protocol standard).

That's another problem: all the subprotocols grafted onto IRC, especially CTCP which is such a mess that most clients don't implement it completely. Then there's mIRC colors which has parsing ambiguities. Also, the multiple passive DCC request formats.

It's a complete mess, and there desperately needs to be a standards body of some sort at the very least collecting all this info in one place for client developers.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#146

Post by jlgreco »

falcolas wrote: post #135
DasIch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that those people may have been in a different timezone and simply were sleeping.

Which is fine, but it doesn't make IRC any more effective than mailing lists for getting answers for open source projects.

Which is better depends entirely on what the question is. Most questions asked on IRC have absolutely no business on a mailing list, and the ensuing discussions would render the mailing list unusable.

Nobody advocates abandoning email for IRC. Right tool for the job, like anything else in life.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#147

Post by e1ven »

Domenic_S wrote: post #115
chipsy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message. Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.

> A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Your shared history vanishes when you're off the network though. Skype has channels, and preserves history, syncing your "rooms" when you log back in. If it were as easy to pipe machine data (syslog, notices, tweets?) into Skype as it is to pipe it into IRC, it'd be perfect.

We use a IRC bouncer for this; It works really well to preserve history, and let me get messages when I'm offline.

when I disconnect, it automatically sets me /away, and renames my nick to e1ven_zz to make it clear to the rest of the team I'm away.. When I log back in, it renames me back to e1ven, and streams everything I missed.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#148

Post by patrickg »

moe wrote: post #31
muuh-gnu wrote: post #23

IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood. They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web b…

Well, except IRC isn't dead... http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2012

When I click through the years, I see its slow decay.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#149

Post by debacle »

pkulak wrote: post #140
debacle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We ditched jabber for IRC at another company I previously worked at, and it became a staple for communication even though our entire office was only ~800 square feet.

Interesting. My company ditched IRC for Jabber. Why did you guys make the switch in that direction?

Simplicity, really. It's easier to find stable IRC clients, and IRC servers tend to be better than Jabber servers.

The only complaint about IRC that I've heard in the past was SSL, however we added SSL to the connection without problems.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#150

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

falcolas wrote: post #113

I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us. IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed comp…

If you need secure IRC, use SILC.
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