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IRCAnywhere

ircanywhere.com

172 pointsbuovjaga51 comments

Hey there, I'm an admin on the IRCAnywhere help channel (Gnasher), and a friend of the creator. The project is currently discontinued. The creator currently has no time outside of work to dedicate to the project and make updates. Due to a lack of other contributors / pull-requests there won't really be much other development. If it interests you though, feel free to fork it or submit a pull-request. If they're good/appropriate I'll get it checked out and possibly merged in.

Wouldn't it be appropiate to update the website to account for this?

It would perhaps be best, up until today the website got only a trickle of traffic so no one bothered with it. It will probably be updated in the coming week or two to reflect the current status.

I suppose the next obvious question is, Anyone in the community that would be willing to take this on?

Will there be a sync of the read status of all messages? That is the feature that I need, the backlog is next to useless without me knowing where I stopped last time.

At the moment no further development is planned at all. So if you want this feature I'm afraid you'll have to build it yourself or find an alternative. There have been multiple mentioned in the thread, one in particular I have heard good things about is Shout-IRC.

If you're already running weechat, you might be interested in checking out Glowing Bear which accomplishes a very similar goal, but without reinventing the weel - it simply connects to you existing weechat (probably running on a server somewhere).

https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear

https://latest.glowing-bear.org

One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that you get the whole functionality of a mature IRC client. You also don't have to trust a third party with your data, as you're connecting to your own client, no middleman involved. It's just a bunch of static files.

Personally I run weechat on a small home server I have and run it in tmux and just ssh into it.

Glowing Bear is helpful on mobile devices without hardware keyboards, still.

I run it on a small dedicated server (kimsufi) in tmux. But instead of sshing into that, I connect to it with Glowing Bear which feels much nicer to me. I also like the mobile support (I use it a lot on my Android phone and my iPad). For Android, we even have a "native" app (using cordova). It's very convenient to have IRC on the go, with synced read marker states and a pleasant interface.

I'll give it a try. Thanks for replying back.

Neat idea, although I would probably stick with irssi[1] running on my server and connecting with mosh[2] to that for mobility with instant session resume.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irssi

[2] https://mosh.mit.edu/

I don't know if you've seen it, there is a fork of Glowing Bear that works with irssi instead of weechat. I don't know how complete it is (I work on the weechat version), but if you're interested, check out my other post and #glowing-bear on freenode!

How does this compare to http://shout-irc.com

And https://www.irccloud.com

One obvious difference is that IRCAnywhere is a discontinued product!

Homepage states: "IRCAnywhere is designed to be an open source alternative to paid services such as IRCCloud"

It seems that IRCCloud also offers mobile apps with push notifications, so IRCAnywhere may not be a complete replacement.

Another is that irccloud is not free!

well, there's a free tier that lets you keep 2 connections + irccloud's server. you just have to keep a web browser open somewhere to avoid the 2 hour timeout. but yea ive always felt their $5 / month plan was a little overpriced. for mobile irccloud's app is fantastic. i dont know if any of these solutions mentioned here even has one

> a free tier that lets you keep 2 connections + irccloud's server. you just have to keep a web browser open somewhere to avoid the 2 hour timeout.

Someone learned their business model from 90's shareware. :)

You can accomplish the same idea with less features DIY with a low cost provider (like a $5 digital ocean box), which is what I have done for years.

I don't think the price point would change my mind either way, but sometimes that convenience is alluring.

Shout look cool better

From what I see, shout-irc does not allow you to stay connected on IRC channels when you are offline or close your browser.

I just installed this and it appears that shout-irc does allow you to stay connected (at least it does when you login as a user)

Reminds me of http://quassel-irc.org/ which is not really a beauty but is working good enough for me at the moment. (I'm just a user, not related to the project in any way)

You beat me to it :)

Only issue is that it has problems running on Windows 10, otherwise I might be using it.

http://bugs.quassel-irc.org/issues/1376

Been looking at quassel and weechat

There is also a new effort to develop a web interface for Quassel. https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver

The quassel-client can be styled with a CSS like syntax:

http://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/1/wiki/Stylesheet_Galle...

I use DarkMonokai: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Zren/2779042/raw/DarkMono...

The default is not pretty ugly though, I agree.

I use Quassel, it works fine for me (Windows 7, Windows 10, Linux, and Android). I like it but it gets updated kind of slowly.

I mean no disrespect here when I say that I have tried IRC anywhere and it is quite good, but as I'm sure you're aware the code maintainability is limited at best. There are workarounds, hacks and shortcuts taken here and there. Im not saying a full rework would be required but there are some of the fundamental issues to be taken care of.

If a team was willing to take it over (should the current owner allow), it would require a substantial investment of time.

Would the current owner // maintainer be open to the possibility of monetisation of a particular feature set // plugin system ? Something like own-cloud, whereby you could purchase a monetisation version to which you could have paying clients on your deployment.

While the free version would not have this particular feature.

Thoughts ?

Edit: The paid feature may also have the associated mobile app also etc. You'd be surprised the interest and community you would accumulate with a financial incentive.

I believe a plugin system was in the works, so paid plugins and the like might be a possibility. There would without a doubt be a lot of work to do on it, it's been over a year, and Node itself has changed dramatically not to mention ember.

As I've mentioned to other people in the thread, if you throw me an email at the address in my HN profile, I will gladly forward it / your questions.

There's also https://kiwiirc.com.

Anyone know of anything like this that integrates well with ZNC?

Just set autoclear to off for your replays, and anything that can connect to IRC becomes like this

Does anyone know how this compares to WebIRC [0]?

[0] https://github.com/pavben/WebIRC

Just see feauture of it and compare

Why doesn't the project owner look to pass it onto a new maintainer to move it forward?

This was previously discussed in the IRC Channel on Freenode. None of the people that have contributed have shown interest in taking over the project. And the majority of the community we have don't know their way around JS/Node outside of installing it on their server.

I would be interested. I know node. Discuss?

Send me an email at the address in my HN profile and I'll put you in touch with the creator.

Sent !

Spoke to him on freenode. He is not interested in passing maintainer to anyone. Wants to hold on to the project and just merge other people PR's in case one day he is interested in this again.

Is this part of the "you must hate slack!" series we're currently all enjoying so much?

Assuming it is, it's a bit amusing to see so many people continue to miss the point. The market for Slack and HipChat is not organizations looking to work harder to maintain their own solutions that ultimately provide less to them.

I am all for using an open source alternative to Slack. But IRC is not it. What we need is a modern, open standard for persistent group chat ala Slack, with security features. I am not saying sit down and draft papers, writing code that can become a standard is fine. Maybe Mattermost is it, I don't know.

Totally relevant to this post.

This exact text has been posted here dozens of times...

Looks like Slack is astroturfing.

Obviously that post is a bit off-topic, but anyone following HN regularly likely inferred that this topic is in response to the recent "Slack vs. IRC" debate that's been going on.

No, it is not.

What is not? All I said was people likely inferred something.

Rocket.Chat perhaps? https://rocket.chat/

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