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Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
61–70 of 222 posts
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#62I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer r…
> 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots).
That's not really an issue of IRC itself, but the IRC network you are using.
Running your own IRC server would solve that issue - ngircd for instance supports authentication using PAM or inspircd can directly perform authentication against either LDAP or a SQL database.
And doesn't IRCv3 SASL authentication + only allowing registered users into the channel pretty much solve the issue as well?
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#63I'm glad Freenode has a user base for work related stuff, but I man do I miss when Undernet or Dalnet was still popular. I know I'll never run into my mother on IRC, and it is probably because of the format.
As an aside since you brought up Undernet: Their CService website[1] has been down for weeks now. As far as I know, that's the only way to even register with X. I'm not sure if this is being worked around, somehow, or if UnderNet is just being left to die.
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? The network protocol for Slack is JSON over WebSockets and is completely documented and supported [1]. You don't need a Slack SDK to speak to Slack and can do it with any plain WebSocket library. Obviously Slack doesn't provide support for 3rd party clients; how could they? But they do provide support to the developers of those clients using their API. [1] https://api.slack.com/rtm
I'm going to remind you of this comment in 5 years.
I mean if Slack didn't end up ruining their API in the name of greater development flexibility I'm not sure I could even comprehend it.
But that's the thing, I think Slack is a fundamentally inappropriate tool for FOSS work or public communications. Anyone who stakes their long-term community on a single company's proprietary product is asking to be hurt down the road. But I don't think IRC is the right alternative because the UX is so newcomer unfriendly and requires so many disparate 3rd party services to be useful. I would much rather see communities standardize on something like Riot or Mattermost with OpenID.
Simultaneously, I think that Slack (and its contemporaries) are a breath of fresh air for internal team/office chat. Sure it's expensive, and like all corporate-y things you have to keep a little distance so you can migrate when they get shitty, but we can at least acknowledge that it's a damn slick product.
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#65I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer r…
> No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer running 24/24 if you want history.
I would say it's even worse than this. Even if you attempt to have a client 24/7, the lack of an acknowledgement and re-transmit on lack of acknowledgement means that if you have any hiccup that causes you to need to reset the TCP connection, you can drop messages.
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#66I'm glad Freenode has a user base for work related stuff, but I man do I miss when Undernet or Dalnet was still popular. I know I'll never run into my mother on IRC, and it is probably because of the format.
I used to run a server on Dalnet (then later on Espernet). Good times; nobody knew I was 15 so I learned a ton about programming from some smart people
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#67I think if most people saw the limitations of irc as the author then it would still be the dominant protocol And it doesn't seem to me that "fixing" irc is just a matter of adding the bells and whistles, but there's some work to be done on the lower levels as well For example, how well would irc work on mobile? Keeping logs requires a bot usually on irc as well.
For mobile, I had a bouncer setup that would keep me up to date whenever someone would message or mention me. I could pull up AndChat and connect right up to all of my channels, I was never actually offline. I had an icon on my taskbar that would connect me to my VPN and pull up irssi. I see now that there is a cloud client for mobile called "IRC Cloud", it sounds like a one step setup kind of bouncer for someone that doesn't have an always online machine to run a bouncer on.
I really do miss using IRC all the time. My favorite server got taken down and I never bothered to find out where everyone ran off to.
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#68I like IRC a lot. Simple, light, and a very good example of the minimalist principle that "less is more".
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#69I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer r…
1. Use nickserv and chanserv? This is solved problem.
2. This is also a solved problem, there are bots that log everything on the channel and then you can read/search through channel history from web interface. But mostly this is not needed as you can just spin znc for whole your team.
Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
#70I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer r…
> No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer running 24/24 if you want history. I would say it's even worse than this. Even if you attempt to have a client 24/7, the lack of an acknowledgement and re-transmit on lack of acknowledgement means that if you have any hiccup that causes you to need to reset the TCP connection, you can drop messages.
Indeed, the dependence on a persistent connection itself is an absolute non-starter for this feature.
It's statistically guaranteed to fail, and IRC as a protocol spec is powerless to do anything other than shrug.