341–350 of 370 posts
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We already use an open source forum: discourse. If you mean real-time chat, in my personal opinion, Discord is the best choice. Zulip is good, if you can deal with it being a bit weird. The other options are fine, but not great. You may have different opinions than me personally.
You mean the same Discord that's now majority-owned by Tencent, right?
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To be fair, it is "frivolous eye-candy”. But that doesnt change the fact that you are not going to reach the people which rank eye candy higher then functionality.
Why would you want to reach those people? Avoiding them sounds like a feature!
People like to frame it as "if they can't even figure out IRC", but that's a straw man. Nearly everyone can "figure out IRC", the question is if they want to bother with it when there's alternative things they could do.
(and I say that as someone who by far prefers IRC over every other group chat system)
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Then presumably you never did work over IRC. The fact that you can have discussions in asynchronous real time out in the open makes (made?) for a far superior developer experience compared to forums, text messages, emails, and everything in between, because everyone could _passively_ follow the conversations that were happening. IRC is the ship's "always on" walkie talkie: do you need it? No. Does it provide a layer…
I was never an IRC user, mainly because I never really needed it. Everyone I wanted to talk to back in the day was on BBSes, later ICQ and later still AIM, and IRC just always seemed so desolate and took a lot of investigative work to find the right channel to find something interesting. I'm not really defending IRC, more than questioning the need for yet another chat application, with a distinct con of being central…
Simply by being in an IRC channel you become part of that, which is radically different from any of the other media you mention, where one has to actively go through the records (as it were) to get an idea of what's going on, and what the shared culture and body of knowledge is.
They really are very different media with a very different experience, and today the only experience that has managed to recreate the value that set IRC apart from other communication tools is Slack/Discord.
If I'm reading this correctly, the main problems they have with IRC is that it's too "old"/obscure, and too open — simultaneously too difficult and too easy to access. Hard to control who gets in and what they say. I haven't seen much spam or harassment on IRC, but I haven't been to Mozilla's server. As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? You could change the font family from monospace to Lato…
I don't really get that for an org that runs their own IRC servers. Requiring external registration, rate limiting, content filtering, ... all are available options. Just because the majority(?) of IRC networks allows access freely doesn't mean you have to. I'm not sure what other systems would add in this regard an IRC server can't do.
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I'm an admin in the Reactiflux server on Discord [0]. We currently show somewhere around 30K users who have joined, although that's _after_ having done a couple purges of inactive accounts over time. I used to routinely go back through the day's discussions in #general and #need-help whenever I got home from work, and yes, reply to questions that had been asked 8-10 hours earlier. But, Reactiflux has become too high-…
This is exactly the functionality of forums, for example Stack Overflow (and many others before SO). I guess the only real advantage of Slack is that it's both real-time and persistent. That said, is that advantage really worth millions of dollars, or is it just clever marketing?
Chat channels give immediate and interactive feedback. When someone asks a question in Reactiflux, they frequently get an answer within minutes, if not seconds, and we can iterate on asking for details quickly if needed.
The downside is that multiple simultaneous conversations in the same channels quickly become hard to handle, questions can get missed if they're not answered right away, and we do see a lot of the same questions over and over.
I know the Spectrum folks have emphasized the searchability of their site as a major selling point, both from Google indexing pages and the ability to search for existing threads. I won't say they're completely wrong, but at the same time, my experience is that newbies in particular won't actually search for existing answers - they just want to ask and have someone answer directly.
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On snoonet at least there is a channel option frequently used, that makes the channel send the last x messages to the recently joined user. It exists.
What ircd are they using?
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sounds like matrix.org
I think bridges are not a good enough level of integration. You really need to have your personal connection to your IRC servers. (Unless the matrix IRC bridge connects to the IRC server with a server-to-server type connection and can thus address messages from/to virtual users on the IRC protocol level. But that would need a lot of coordination and authorizations from IRC server administrators, which brings in so mu…
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My chat logs are just plain text under ~/.weechat/logs and I search them using rip-grep. Works really fast. I am guessing a nicer interface like IRCCloud or TheLounge can work like Slack for searching, file/snippet hosting etc in a more approachable manner.
So, you come to a new job and join a channel that has been around for 2 years. Design decisions and discussions from 4 months ago with the old tech lead are there. Does weechat give you access to those logs?
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IRC has gigatons of clients because it is an open protocol. Some clients are even shareware/commercial. Same goes for servers and server admin interfaces. IRC may have its shortcomings, but its worst defect, for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate, is that it is not "modern".
Its worst problem is the inability to request scrollback from the server. I don't understand why that extension wasn't written, like, 20 years ago. You also need a "de facto official" client that includes a small list of default servers, and big friendly buttons for /JOIN and /PART - in fact the user should not be required to type a /COMMAND at any point.
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> straw-man argument Not at all a strawman argument. As I stated, there are a plethora of features in Slack, Discord, and its ilk that are most assuredly not "having fun while pretending to communicate". The whole point of my post is that one cannot so off-handedly dismiss an entire class of application. If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Un…
> If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Unicode emoji to IRC, and will anybody call that frivolous?) OP confirms. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Yes, you can use Unicode in IRC, and yes, people will kick you out if you "misuse" it - but perhaps I've been on weird channels. > incorrectly-entered Markdown formatting, or other kinds of minor r…
No, Markdown in Slack, Discord, etc.
> Chat messages shouldn't be longer than a tweet
Says who? You?
You're not the arbiter of how people should choose to communicate. Aside from that, there are good situations on Discord and Slack where messages tend to be longer, such as announcements, lists of rules, when posting code blocks, giving detailed explanations, etc.
> If you need formatting then you're writing a document, not chatting
Again, says who? People have had formatting in instant chat for years, in AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, etc. People can use formatting to provide emphasis, to separate code blocks, etc.
Even IRC supports basic bold text blocks.
> There we agree you need another service for that
No, we don't agree. Why should you need an external service for that? Why send people out of the discussion to an external website, a needless interruption of the flow?
There may be times when that's appropriate, but a chat service, something that's inherently about conversations and keeping things in context, no longer needs to mandate this. There are no technical restrictions to this as there were in the 80s and 90s. If people want to share a snippet in the conversation, they should, and now can, do so.
Same goes for images, videos, etc.
> Good communication starts with choosing the appropriate tool
People have found the appropriate tool, have flocked to it in droves, and are quite satisfied.
It's only old-fashioned IRC-clinging fuddy-duds who think there's still any question about this. Everybody else is getting on quite productively and happily.