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Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

drewdevault.com

211–220 of 222 posts

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#211
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I wanted real world conversation, I can drop into a conference call, I don't need IRC for that. Chats in organizations are specifically for when email is not realtime enough but it's important to keep a record of the conversations for some time.

> Chats in organizations are specifically for

This varies immensely per organisation so it's always kind of dangerous to generalise like this. For example: The use-case you quote does not align with my experience of (bigcorp) chats at all.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#212
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted real world conversation, I can drop into a conference call, I don't need IRC for that. Chats in organizations are specifically for when email is not realtime enough but it's important to keep a record of the conversations for some time.

> Chats in organizations are specifically for This varies immensely per organisation so it's always kind of dangerous to generalise like this. For example: The use-case you quote does not align with my experience of (bigcorp) chats at all.

So your bigcorp does not require any chatlogs or did they phase out email entirely for chat? Or both?

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#213
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chats in organizations are specifically for This varies immensely per organisation so it's always kind of dangerous to generalise like this. For example: The use-case you quote does not align with my experience of (bigcorp) chats at all.

So your bigcorp does not require any chatlogs or did they phase out email entirely for chat? Or both?

Logs for regular chat are removed after a very limited amount of time.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#214
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand the real quality of running an IRC client from anywhere on anything. I don't need to carry around a $4000 laptop to get my work done when I can use my home dev server from anywhere using a 10-year old Thinkpad junker. Break it? Pitch it and buy another for less than $100 on ebay.

Saying Slack requires a $4000 laptop is a bit of hyperbole don't you think? I've used the Slack web client on a $300 Chromebook and it was just fine.

You don't need that for Slack but if you want a quality machine to carry around to handle your workload, that's the price neighborhood.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#215
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your bigcorp does not require any chatlogs or did they phase out email entirely for chat? Or both?

Logs for regular chat are removed after a very limited amount of time.

So you do need logs, just not forever.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#216
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not equivalent though, with IRC scripting you can do whatever you want. With Slack or Discord you do whatever Slack or Discord allows you to do. You also don't have to worry about features becoming unavailable or gimped in the future.

It is equivalent. It is also the reason why Slack and others have taken the world by storm, and why IRC and XMPP are more or less dying. Because Slack (and FB messenger, and Apple Messages, and Discord, and... and...) provide an out-of-the-box experience immediately available to anyone (including non-programmers or programmers who couldn’t care less about scripting a yet another barebones app). And the problems conti…

> It is also the reason why Slack and others have taken the world by storm

The same thing could have been said about messaging clients like ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger etc. vs IRC, but none of them remain while IRC is still actively used.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#217
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logs for regular chat are removed after a very limited amount of time.

So you do need logs, just not forever.

I think either you misunderstood the scope of what I meant ("I need to see what I just wrote") or I misunderstood the scope of what you meant ("I need to see what I wrote last month") when talking about logging. I should have asked for a more specific definition.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#218
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netsplits are pretty rare these days.

Yeah? I just counted six netsplits in the past 24 hours that affected a channel I'm on on IRCnet. I still love IRC. My second home.

This is because of IRCnet is operated by multiple entities and has rather peculiar links, other networks are not like this.

http://dx.fi/alt/ircmap/fdp.png here’s a map of IRCnet, they’re really going out of their way to generate netsplits.

A network operated by a single entity doesn’t need such a silly amount of nodes, you can support hundreds of thousands of IRC uses on a single server.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#219
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1: Most users of Slack don't even use the slash commands, so I'd say that requiring what ammounts to CLI syntax to manage channels and accounts, something you get for free in a user-friendly way in most modern communication tools, is a nonstarter. Re 2: ZNC works, but is a really trash user experience from both sides. For instance, you never really know if someone is there or not. Also no push messages, which brea…

1. GUIs can be (and have been) written for channel management and other functions. There's multiple clients (or client plugins) for such functions as changing modes (with checkboxes), changing the topic, etc. 2. ZNC has plugins for push messages, or at least it did when I was using it several years ago. My personal bouncer was configured to automatically set my away status when I went offline; alternatives include (d…

1: At the client level, sure. Where's the ChanServ/NickServ/OperServ GUI (that interoperates with the 5 or 6 most common service packages?)

2: Which ties right back into point 1 that setting this up is not user-friendly.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#220
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have defined a bouncer as something that also speaks IRC to the client.

I don't think irccloud does either?

Yes, Irccloud isn't a bouncer by that definition, but a hosted client.
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