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IRC is dead, long live IRC

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Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#41

Post by shabble »

kybernetyk wrote: post #10
lucian1900 wrote: post #9

It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time. Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

He, for me it's the other way: I like IRC because it's very simplistic. But when I have to do something with XMPP on the protocol level I just want to stab my eyes out because it's a bloated pile of XML. Maybe it depends on tooling. If you have a language that is married with XML - like Java - you probably will have no problems with XMPP. But if you're doing stuff with C you will love the simple structure of IRC.

XML is a gleaming beacon of purity and grace compared to the CTCP spec[1]. Something that should be relatively simple: "allow very basic RPC using inband signals." The mess of incoherent and mutually contradictory statements about how quoting these messages should happen makes it likely that anyone writing a bot either uses an existing library or still wakes up occasionally in teh middle of the night in a cold sweat.

[1] http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/rfc/ctcpspec.html

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#42

Post by mseebach »

rgbrenner wrote: post #37
zalew wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more like: sooo, this dude didn't know crap about the internet and launched one of the biggest websites in the world. #fml

this is what I was thinking too. maybe this explains why it was written in PHP? :)

No. I have no numbers, but I'd say we're looking at 80-90% of all websites written in dorm rooms in 2003 were written in PHP. Most of the rest in classic ASP (which was barely 'classic' yet in 2003).

For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#43

Post by mootothemax »

andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used.

I agree with you. I recently worked with a lovely tech agency who used IRC for a lot of communication amongst their office and remote-based workers. Typically, each project had its own chat room, and we'd create private chat rooms as required if only a couple of us needed to discuss something.

I was really surprised with how well the system worked - and how easy it was to use! It'd probably been a decade or more since I'd used IRC, and it was a really pleasant rediscovery.

In short: I'll be recommending its use in future.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#45

Post by contingencies »

sandGorgon wrote: post #33

here's a question - if I want to setup a company wide IRC server, which (super easy to install) server should I go for ? Do note that I will be hosting this on EC2, so some semblance of authentication/security would be welcome.

First, consider XMPP instead.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#46

Post by martinp »

sandGorgon wrote: post #33

here's a question - if I want to setup a company wide IRC server, which (super easy to install) server should I go for ? Do note that I will be hosting this on EC2, so some semblance of authentication/security would be welcome.

At my previous job we setup a internal company IRC server using InspIRCd [0]. We decided to host it on EC2 as well, and restricted access to it by putting the instance in our VPC [1] (only reachable over VPN).

It became pretty popular and it was a great way to communicate between branch offices.

[0] http://inspircd.github.com

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#47

Post by kybernetyk »

jeffool wrote: post #18
andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

I don't know about know, but I remember being told as recently as a couple of years ago that id Software used it as an inter-office chat tool. I certainly have imagined its use at jobs before, even when I worked in call centers. It couldn't be hard to let the rank and file chat when not on a call. (Yes, they were oddly draconian about doing nothing, or reading a book, between calls. Forget your book and your day is r…

Around 2000 when I got out of school I was working as a programmer for a company that made J2ME mobile games.

They were sitting in the Netherlands and had hired a bunch of teleworkers. Mostly from Germany and Poland.

And whenever there were meetings (even with the bosses) we used IRC for that. It was pretty cool. You were also allowed to go AFK but you had to leave your client open to read the backlogs. (People knew beforehand if their active presence was required in the meeting.)

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#48

Post by nicholassmith »

I stopped using irc about 4 years ago, and came back to it a year ago. It's like an old, faithful, trusty friend. That said, it does seem like a lot of people have abandoned it for pastures new, but everything old and boring becomes new and exciting again at some stage so who knows, we might see an resurgence.
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