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IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

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Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#351

Post by dmitriid »

klez wrote: post #271
frankietwenty9 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> This can be automated with a irc client, of course.

And of course it was automated. There are any number of such clients. Slack. Facebook Messenger. WeChat. Viber. Dozens of them. Of course they don't use IRC. But they automate file delivery. And media inlining. And dozens, if not hundreds of other things.

Meanwhile the "nothing stops you from implementing" crowd implements nothing and keeps wondering why basically no one uses these wonderful open protocols.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#352

Post by walshemj »

justin66 wrote: post #168
nopacience wrote: post #76

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…

> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful > Email, IRC, HTML, FTP FTP sucked back in the day and it still sucks. Otherwise, yeah.

In what way I never had any problem using ftp

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#353

Post by walshemj »

minitech wrote: post #292
nopacience wrote: post #76

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…

> 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.)

Text has a lot of advantages - I know as I had to debug OSI binary protocols - You had to dump it out to a textual representation.

unless you had spent years and could read the protocol in its binary form

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#354

Post by Spivak »

rasengan wrote: post #305
stickshift wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was literally my first comment when I installed Slack for the first time: Isn't this essentially what IRC did for many years?

Exactly. Slack is like IRC without the features.

Being blind about the actual tech involved, Slack is effectively IRC with a lot of the features that would be provided by external services bundled.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#355

Post by nasredin »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #233
nopacience wrote: post #76

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…

If only someone would pay Kanye to promote IRC

Yo XKCD Sucks, I'm really happy for you, I'm gonna let you finish but IRC did not have the best UI of all time!

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#356

Post by dmitriid »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #287
dmitriid wrote: post #129

Earlier 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…

Strange that you mention XMPP as you can have all that (including mobile - Conversations) plus end-to-end encryption (OTR, OMEMO, PGP - take your pick), message carbon copies and a server-side message archive that synchronizes all your clients. But hey, XMPP is passé so everyone prefers a vendor lock-in.

It's not strange. Because Conversations exists only on Android (and the server you connect to has to support all the dozens of XEPs many of which are still in experimental stage).

So, with Conversations I'm locked into a single client on a single platform. Yay, XMPP :-/ (There's no desktop client I'm aware of that supports Conversations' features).

Oh, and I can have that only if I go through the trouble of setting up all the moving pieces myself. Because I really really really want to spend my time picking which flavour of end-to-end encryption to use (in which clients?) and how to make sure that a server-side searchable archive exists (accessible through which client??) or that media and files reach even offline clients (which clients???) etc.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#357

Post by gwillen »

zingmars wrote: post #309
rasengan wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricks? Can you elaborate? Like what outside of taking the scope outside of the IRC client (external link, etc) An IRC cloak is programmed into the ircd itself ensuring that ones IP address is not exposed. I don’t think you can just hack that. If you use the external link trick, everyone is susceptible to that no matter what app/platform they use unless you use a VPN or Tor.

That depends on the ircd, but on Freenode you could decloak using the services to ban the user from channel using IP ranges and see if they trigger (I think. It has been a few years since I this trick used, and it might've not even been bans). Extremely inefficient, but if you have a bouncer with auto rejoin on... In any case there are some really obsessed people who probably know a hundred ways to take over your cha…

Channel takeovers aren't really a thing on modern networks with good services.

The Freenode decloak trick still works, though.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#358

Post by u801e »

wumpus wrote: post #48
bandrami wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first class support for emoji I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.

Having used slack at a business, emoji reactions to comments are an extremely valuable business feature -- they allow people to react without having to make a full-sized comment, which helps keep conversations compact.

> emoji reactions to comments are an extremely valuable business feature

How is it better than just having upvotes and downvotes like what's done on websites like HN, reddit, and Slashdot? Personally, I don't see much value when seeing 5 different reaction emojis right under a comment I post in a Slack channel.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#359

Post by coatmatter »

csomar wrote: post #269
tptacek wrote: post #174

Earlier 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 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.

> I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality.

I do, and I think it's a good constraint (better than the 140/280 char Tweet restriction). No excessive notifications by default, no impatient people (at least largely not because they don't tend to hang around anyway). The pace is more predictable and consistent, and it's easier than ever to have a 24/7 detached client/bouncer.

For some years, fancier services like Facebook robbed creativity and time from me but lately I've returned to a more simple flow that isn't affected by Eternal September.

IRC has a certain barrier of entry, so that tends to keep a lot of the low quality noise away (where it remains on other platforms such as Discord and YouTube).

I recognise that Slack and Discord have their own objectives, but IRC covers its own niche well.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#360

Post by wikibob »

djhworld wrote: post #276
jwilk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing about emoji in this article.

I wish email had this feature. Sometimes I might ask someone to do something, and when they reply like "Done", it would be nice to just react with a thumbs up or something rather than continuing the chain of emails with a "Thank you" etc

Surprisingly, Office 365 Exchange + Outlook has this now. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/like-an-email-messa...
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