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Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

When I first looked for something to let me be "always on" I ran into the same advice you're giving. It didn't help me at all. Most people looking for the answer to "how can I have always-on IRC with a backlog" don't want to learn about what a BNC is or the pros and cons of the various BNC solutions out there, they want something actionable.

I ended up installing Quassel with a docker image and downloading a Quassel client for my laptop and smartphone. I hear it's possible to connect to Quassel (and other bouncers?) with regular IRC clients, too, but I can't be arsed to figure out how.

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> When I first looked for something to let me be "always on" I ran into the same advice you're giving. It didn't help me at all. Most people looking for the answer to "how can I have always-on IRC with a backlog" don't want to learn about what a BNC is or the pros and cons of the various BNC solutions out there, they want something actionable.

This is a really strange comment. If the question is "How do I get always-on IRC" then the answer is "Use a bouncer". Following up with "People don't want to learn about a bouncer" is the same thing as "People don't really want the answer". I'm confused.

How is "Install ZNC" (as an example of a bouncer) not "actionable"?

Installing a bouncer means following technical documentation and having a server free. The first requirement kills the interest of people who want a single app install. The second kills the interest of people who want the service free and run by a third party.

These are not enormous barriers but they were enough to put me off of setting up Quassel on a VPS for a few years. Now that I've done it I don't want to go back, of course, and I don't see it as a huge chore to do it again. But that's what's making it "not actionable" - the perception that this is going to end in a nightmare of configuration files and Stack Overflow searches.

That's part of the reason why "Quassel as a service" would be a very powerful tool.

Currently, though, we have to tell users who want that to use IRCCloud instead - about half of the people come back after the first week of free usage of IRCCloud when it asks you to pay, and start using Quassel from then on.

I totally understand that installing a bouncer isn't desirable or easy for everybody. But to call it unhelpful and non-actionable is just ridiculous.

The double-edged sword of bouncers is that they try to strap the behavior we're looking for on top of IRC which forces them to do it in a convoluted way.

Connecting to multiple networks with a bouncer has always felt like a kludgey disaster to me because of this. I don't want to have to define another connection from each of my actual clients to my bouncer to add another network, I just want to add another network. When I get a new system or reinstall an old one I don't want to have to set up a half dozen connections.

Quassel gets this right and keeps things separated. All IRC network settings exist at the server (bouncer) only, the client needs nothing more than a username and a password for the server and gets everything else from there.

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