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IRC is dead, long live IRC

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Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#161

Post by jff »

elbear wrote: post #134
jff wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll pipe up if the question is something like "What's the flag to make ls display in color?". IRCers are generally pretty quiet if you ask something actually technical or involving the code, or they'll just offer up a lot of speculation and irrelevant links. My theory is that the real project leaders and developers use mailing lists because they need to get work done, not watch IRC.

That depends a lot on the project. I've noticed significant difference in the attitude of several IRC communities.

Definitely true. It can be really great if the main developers are actually using the IRC channel to coordinate development, but I think that can only really work when there aren't a ton of users to be poking in all the time. Kind of a Catch-22 problem; Linus would not be well-served to hang out on a Linux channel, because (as anyone who has seen his Google+ posts can testify) an army of sycophants would feel the need to interject their own non-content responses to everything he says. A small project, however, can still coordinate among developers while helping the odd user who shows up.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#162

Post by jasey »

As the article mentions outside of freenode and tech departments / company's who are tech oriented IRC is dead or atleast declining.

Back in the day you could find a server to talk about your favorite band or hobby or tv show. Meet like minded people and make friends.

Today Twitter or Google+ is probably the closest alternative but are lacking the essence of what IRC was.

At scussion.com we are working on building realtime chat to be integrated with these communities (interest based communities).

I would love to just have a hangout to chat about sci if or sport like IRC was back in the day.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#163

Post by philsnow »

cdmoyer wrote: post #133
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 mean, I can give you the reasons that I have a hipchat account which I use with my coworkers, even though a good 50% of us are also on IRC for other purposes. 1) It proved to be a pain supporting the non-techies using IRC 2) Nobody wanted to maintain the IRC server and set up logging. (And, if you add up the couple hours to do so and maintain it in a year, hipchat ends up being a good deal) 3) Some of our people us…

When you host your chat on somebody else's service, you don't have privacy (or confidentiality).

For me, that trumps all your points. It seems that for you, it doesn't. The world's a crazy place.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#164

Post by cdmoyer »

philsnow wrote: post #163
cdmoyer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I can give you the reasons that I have a hipchat account which I use with my coworkers, even though a good 50% of us are also on IRC for other purposes. 1) It proved to be a pain supporting the non-techies using IRC 2) Nobody wanted to maintain the IRC server and set up logging. (And, if you add up the couple hours to do so and maintain it in a year, hipchat ends up being a good deal) 3) Some of our people us…

When you host your chat on somebody else's service, you don't have privacy (or confidentiality). For me, that trumps all your points. It seems that for you, it doesn't. The world's a crazy place.

Yeah. We use google apps, dropbox, unfuddle, GitHub, hipchat, Linode and amazon. Basically, we're pretty comfortable trusting our business with these companies. We're not in a space where we have secrets that really would give someone a competitive advantage. A few things like security credentials are shared offline or in a truecrypt volume.

I mean. If that's truly a concern, it seems like you need to own and configure your own physical hardware and require VPN access to all of them. For us/me, the cost and inconvenience isn't worth it, considering the basically valueless data to an outsider.

That's not to say that everyone decision matrix is the same or should be... As you mention.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#165

Post by Hawkee »

williamcotton wrote: post #160
Hawkee wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, quite a testimony. Thank you! Is this it? http://www.hawkee.com/view.php?file_id=205

Yup, that's it! Haha, nice find.

That's a deprecated page. It says 2003 because I rewrote the site in PHP that year and had no dates associated with the scripts prior to that. The download link doesn't work anymore, but I probably still have the file on the server if you want it.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#166

Post by bonch »

jlgreco wrote: post #152
laumars wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

@bonch (your comment is 'dead') The idiosyncracies that you have to get into when you want to write a proper client for humans, and what you actually have to worry about if your aim is just writing tools that use IRC (internal deployment bots, or whatnot) are miles apart. The vast majority of users will only be interested in the second. Just follow the RFCs for the features that you need, and ignore everything else.…

Well, look at one of my examples: RPL_NAMREPLY, which returns a list of nicknames in the channel, prefixed by channel privilege. One privilege is returned at a time according to the protocol, despite the fact that a user can have multiple privileges at once, such as +vo. If such a user is deopped, your tool won't know that they are +v unless you have taken the steps to gather this state previously (this also means there is a period of time after joining a channel in which you're not in sync with the channel modes the server is seeing).

There are extensions to the protocol to support returning multiple privileges in RPL_NAMREPLY, but now your tool has to support both modes of operation. Additionally, the usual medium for discovering these extensions, RPL_ISUPPORT, slightly differs between networks, and today there are now multiple ways to query a server's capabilities, so you have to support RPL_ISUPPORT, PROTOCTL, CAP, and possibly others I haven't seen, and their features overlap. Also, none of these are officially standardized.

All this adds up to needless hassle when you're trying to implement a full-featured framework or tool. These are problems that should have been officially addressed years ago so that everyone is on the same page.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#167

Post by moe »

patrickg wrote: post #148
moe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes there has been some decay since 1998 (unsurprisingly), but in the past years it's been nowhere near as dramatic as it may seem at a glance - the charts are just difficult to compare due to the jumping scales and colors.

Freenode, for example, keeps growing steadily since 2007, many of the smaller networks show pretty much a flatline or cross-shift in the same timeframe.

As it stands the networks still serve ~500k daily users; seems a bit early to call it "dead".

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#168

Post by contingencies »

zaphar wrote: post #93
contingencies wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, consider XMPP instead.

Or do yourself a favor and don't. For casual group chat IRC blows xmpp out of the water. Every experience I've had with xmpp group chat has been subpar and frustrating.

Sure, but if it's company-linked, then you can use it for event alerts, automated contact list sharing when employees come and go, and other interesting features. The popular clients easily integrate with single sign-on type stuff on most platforms. You can point non-technical users at it and they understand. IRC is not like that.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#169

Post by atsaloli »

ahnberg wrote: post #102

I'm maybe an exception since I am and have "always" been heavily involved in IRC, but IRC is still a central part of my life. My irssi session is connected to around 120 channels on 16-or-so networks right now. I've met my fianceé on IRC, got friends for life from all over the world through IRC, got jobs and assignments through IRC and I almost daily solve complex problems with the help of my community and network of…

How do you keep up with 120 channels? Doesn't stuff just scroll by? Do you keep logs or is the chat traffic paginated? Or do you just read what's on your screen when you switch to a certain channel? Or what IS your system for keeping up with so many channels?
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