281–290 of 397 posts
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> The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. You know, I have a hard time blaming "average" people for not wanting to use bitchX. That's a pretty huge unforced error in terms of marketing.
One man's stumbling block is another man's competency test.
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Ahh yes, price dumping, one of the big forces behind "disruption" see: Uber, Lyft, any number of startups growing by losing money, and one of the main anti-competitive forces the government has no desire in addressing. Don't have billions in investor money to lose? You can't play. edit. bring on the downvotes bootlickers, "valid strategy" my ass
Hi zajd, I want to upvote your comment but I don't think I can do that while it calls HN downvoters "bootlickers". Would you consider removing that part?
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I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and openness. I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.
Matrix?
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The protocol itself doesn't bar you from implementing image sharing. Imagine this: You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on th…
Sounds like you're describing a new protocol.
I mean, this proposal is to build it on top of IRC, it doesn't need to change how the IRC protocol works. We're speaking a level above that.
For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc) it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go. Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram
Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of course, logged everything. I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can. Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less…
Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it 1000x easier to onboard new users
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The protocol itself doesn't bar you from implementing image sharing. Imagine this: You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on th…
Sounds like you're describing a new protocol.
For example to provide authentication many servers provide a bot called NickServ. There could also be a mechanism called ProfileServ that implements these functionalities.
The beauty of IRC is that you can open telnet, connect to an IRC server and actually be able to chat by typing raw commands.
The problem with IRC is that there is no standard specification, and there are many many edge cases. Therefore in my experience most IRC clients implement a small subset of the IRC protocol.
I've been trying to write an irc client in Go for quite some time (https://github.com/terminalcommand/irc-v2). It's been a fun experience, but there is still a lot to cover.
Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different…
I resent that you resent "average people". I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who…
But hey, XMPP is passé so everyone prefers a vendor lock-in.
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What functional improvements are fundamentally incompatible with the "old" protocols? Longer lines could have been supported with a minor protocol revision. Giving customers the freedom to use clients that don't render images, or markup, is actually a positive. I setup Mattermost for my company. The deciding factor between Mattermost and IRC was effort to get non-technical users a nice GUI. Functionally, IRC would ha…
it feel a bit biased when you say that IRC could have a protocol bump, but you wouldn't make the same modifications to hide pictures in Mattermost. Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first. In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.
Maybe I'm missing the point here: But IRC does have a file transfer feature, so what would stop people from sharing images just the same way like plenty of "content" has been shared over IRC?
IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared across devices are just too useful.