Earlier quoted context omitted.
One man's stumbling block is another man's competency test.
One man's competency is another man's elitism
One man's pithy saying is another man's frustrating truism.
IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
341–350 of 397 posts
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too. "Back in the day" they had no choice or little other choice but. And even then "normal people" would prefer things like AIM and ICQ for reasons obvious to anyone except the self-proclaimed not-normal above-average über-men.
But mIRC was (is?) also easy to use. AIM, Discord etc. have the 'word-processor problem': the protocol and the interface are inexorably intertwined. You're stuck with whatever user interface they provide. And this 'word-processor problem' is compounded by the 'normal people' issue, or, even worse than that, the 'lowest common user' problem. It's optimisation not for the best or the most powerful or even the prettiest…
> With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users
Please show me a cross-platform good interface for "normal people" for either IRC or XMPP: that supports all the latest standards and is on par with, say, Slack. Where cross-platform isn't Windows-Linus-Mac, but desktop-mobile.
For IRC I'm aware of none (except the ... closed-source web/electron-based irccloud, the irony). For XMPP there's just Conversations for Android, and that's it.
I also like the tech bro considers "normal users" to be bad, be cause there's "even worse than that, the lowest common user". There is a reason why people don't use the crappy half-baked barely usable crap that tech-bro non-normal above-average über men produce.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#343I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment apparently)
IRC is what introduced me to client-server architecture. Like many back then and still today I had this vague idea of "server" meaning some kind of powerful computer with no monitor. I used to love IRC but I was only in dialup Internet and wasn't allowed to use it very often. I sorely wanted to be able to idle on IRC at all times like some people did. But then I discovered I could actually install unrealircd on my ow…
LOL I used to go to network cafes to be able to connect before we finally had cable internet at our place (dialup was too expensive). Since you mentioned "idle on IRC at all times", me and a friend of mine (who I still work with to this day!) used to sell shell boxes for people to install PsyBNC and Eggdrops on. First brush with business, those were the days haha
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
> standard specification RFC 1459
Unfortunately RFC 1459 is just the shallow end. It both includes features that no-one uses anymore, and excludes widely-deployed features that everyone relies on. Lots of the de-facto IRC protocol isn't written down anywhere outside various client and server codebases. The situation is not unlike that of terminal control sequences. The core VT10x functionality is more-or-less mostly in place, ish, in every terminal e…
I believe that https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ documents how the IRC protocol is currently used (and I'm not sure why they chose that particular tld).
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever tried it? 90% of the time I tried it didn't work, in mirc or irssi.
dcc sends and xdcc bots were pretty influential in the early internet. It definitely works.
It does require that one open a port in their firewall for it to actually work. xdcc bots usually would indicate which port one needed to open.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s e…
I would be happy if it looked like 1995. It was actually decentralized.
Not only that, but it didn't require nearly as much bandwidth. AFAIK, most "modern" web services today would not be usable over a dial-up speed connection.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#347Long 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…
IRC is and always will be, the greatest social network :)
Usenet isn't that bad either :)
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#348Long 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…
IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users. Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.
> IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users.
I never understood this sentiment. In the '90s and the previous decade, I corresponded with many people over IRC and usenet who were definitely "non-engineer users". What changed in the last 10 years to make many people believe that one has to have a technical/engineering background to be capable of using things like IRC?
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I sense a contradiction in this statement...
You only sense the contradiction because you share a common HN delusion: that you are above average unique non-normal tech bro über man.
This delusion is what stops such people from understanding why Slack/Viber/WhatsApp/iMessage/WeChat etc. won and XMPP and IRC lost.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#350Long 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…
> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful > Email, IRC, HTML, FTP These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)
> E-mail effectively can’t be made private.
It definitely can be both in transit and when stored.