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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#221

Post by triviatise »

I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players, many of them asked to play for real money. People created graphical clients and another guy extended the code to add tournament rules.

Apparently poker pro chris ferguson first started playing poker on IRC.

I definitely missed a huge opportunity to monetize it.

IRC these days is a bit of a mess with custom authentication protocols that make it too hard to use. Slack is extremely easy to setup for an organization and just works.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#222

Post by HoppyHaus »

s3krit wrote: post #185
HoppyHaus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For servers it depends. If you are going all-out, InspIRCd is what I roll. The only complaints I have with it are the massive config file (~2800 lines with the main config and the module config, more if you count the lesser files). The server for getting and going is UnrealIRCd, which is what I used to run. Solid and basic, just with a few less features. For clients, I use Hexchat, which ill fight for as the best gra…

I'm assuming you mean irssi, rather than ircii. ircii is super old and basically unused these days.

Hah, yeah, sorry. I actually had to use ircii once, so its always in the back of my head. Unfortunately.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#223

Post by Toenex »

nexxer wrote: post #155
paulie_a wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irc was awesome, efnet was particularly fun as a teenager. Forcing network splits, installing eggdrop bots to take over a channel. Efnet was the wild west where basically anything was okay. Dalnet was more civilized. Undernet was definitely for warez. I wonder if anyone ever paid for a mirc license in those days.

Back when I was much more active on Undernet and EFNet, there was talk of 1-2 people actually having paid for an mIRC license. Personally, a couple years ago I found the latest nagging screen guilt-trippy enough that I paid for a license even though I rarely use it.

Same people bagged themselves a WinZip license too I'll bet!

Re: IRC turns thirty

#224

Post by icedchai »

donatj wrote: post #34

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

I used to do this when I was a teenager.

Look at "modern" chat protocols (like XMPP...): it's a nightmare in comparison!

Re: IRC turns thirty

#225

Post by _8j50 »

beefhash wrote: post #55
_8j50 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the complete lack of security and blind trust of server operators? It's downright dangerous to use it,but then again people still use email.

Your argument can be made about more or less any popular chat platform to have ever existed. At least you can set up your own IRCd, so you and your friends don't have to trust nobodies on the Internet.

It's not safe. Period.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#226

Post by _8j50 »

paulie_a wrote: post #54
_8j50 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the complete lack of security and blind trust of server operators? It's downright dangerous to use it,but then again people still use email.

The same can be said for slack too. Irc is far superior.

You like irc. Does not mean it's superior. It's unsafe and lacks too many features natively. It wasn't even great in the early 90s. It was popular and I liked the experience but the protocol is even more broken than email.

I am a fan of simplicity,but it needs to be safe to use and friendly to users.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#227

Post by MaxLeiter »

bkircher wrote: post #142
xPaw wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only need to setup Lounge once, it supports multiple users at the same time. A non geeky person should have no trouble joining a channel.

Oh, wow. I see. With push notifications, mobile clients, TLS encryption this _could_ work in a company setting …provided you keep logs and make search results available for staff, too. Cool. Thanks for the links!

Logs are kept as text files and in a MySQL database (as of v3, which should be released soon™)

Searching logs is currently being worked on, you can see an MVP here - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge/pull/2627

Re: IRC turns thirty

#228

Post by yeukhon »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #116
yeukhon wrote: post #23

I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main online network.

What newbies? Users? Devs? Communities serve a purpose and are not for everyone. On slack and Gitter they are often focused on work, on getting things done, so they really don't care about users or new developers and their problems which are unrelated to the project. And this is good, because everyone needs a channel where they can focus on getting things done.

You have no clue what in the world you are talking about. Hashicorp as an example use Gitter as one of the support channels and yet the community response there is poor as hell.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#229

Post by lx3459683 »

For anyone wondering where IRC users have migrated these days, the answer is Discord.

There are several programming-themed servers with thousands of concurrent users, and many more high population servers for other interest groups.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#230

Post by PurpleRamen »

yeukhon wrote: post #228
PurpleRamen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What newbies? Users? Devs? Communities serve a purpose and are not for everyone. On slack and Gitter they are often focused on work, on getting things done, so they really don't care about users or new developers and their problems which are unrelated to the project. And this is good, because everyone needs a channel where they can focus on getting things done.

You have no clue what in the world you are talking about. Hashicorp as an example use Gitter as one of the support channels and yet the community response there is poor as hell.

Is it as poor as your behaviour here? Should I call hackernews now a poor and toxic plattform too?
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