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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

There are drawbacks, though:

* no built-in file uploads

* a bot is required for archiving

* a bot is required for notifications

* no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies

* the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking.

It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either rolling your own solution, or using a lot of other software to accommodate everything and everyone.

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* file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

* channel services can provide archiving and notifications.

* scrollback can be handled by a bouncer, yes, but it's up to the IT dept to set it up per-user

* there are plenty of usable irc clients for mobile, web, and desktop to satisfy this need.

source: Started using telegram/slack but productivity went down so work launched an internal ircd (inspircd). Internal wiki, git, and sharepoint for documentation/files/code where it belongs. Not the chat client.

> * file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

Nope. They're extremely useful. Just offhand I can think of tons of times we've (a) pasted metric graphs, (b) pasted annotated screengrabs, (c) pasted snippets of code, (d) pasted snippets of test output. None of this is easy in IRC.

But once they're pasted in there, they can only be used there. It's barely harder to upload a file to any myriad of file sharing/hosting services and paste a link which most graphical IRC clients can be configured to auto-expand (and users who don't care/don't want a bunch of images can choose to handle links differently)

I want the text snippets to be shown inline. I'm fine with Slack owning the image assets, because I don't have to worry about permissions the way I would if I uploaded them somewhere else (unless it was to some other internal tool).

I've been on IRC since 1993, and I'm an accomplished programmer. I still find setting up and configuring ZNC and an IRC client complicated, error-error prone, and confusing. And it doesn't always work - sometimes it quits working for no reason and I have to restart things.

In particular, there are many settings that mention security, encryption, and certificates. It's unclear what combinations are sensible, supported, or necessary.

fwiw, I use bip rather than znc.

> file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

We can agree to disagree, but I think that the wide adoption of things like Slack and Hipchat are strong indicators that most people side with me.

What sort of productivity problems did y'all have? Because I have a hard and fast rule - if someone tries to introduce a giphy bot into a channel, I will throw a full-blown tantrum and abuse it until it's gone.

I do agree with you wholeheartedly that Slack, etc., are not a place for documentation.

Life of the party here!

What's the problem with giphy? Is it too silly? Too much light hearted humor going on in your team's chat?

> Too much light hearted humor going on in your team's chat?

We have an off-topic room for light-hearted humor, and it generally gets more traffic than any of the work related channels!

> What's the problem with giphy? Is it too silly?

It's usually too irrelevant. Someone tries to do "/giphy smile", and the result is something that's not actually someone smiling. So they try again. And again. And then it's just people playing giggle roulette, without any actual content. Even off-topic, humor rooms need a decent signal to noise ratio.

Matrix[1] solves some of these issues, notably the archiving and native scrollback, and has a working IRC gateway. We're experimenting with it at our IRC network now.

1. http://matrix.org/

Can you name your IRC network and elaborate on how you are planning to integrate Matrix into it?

IRCCloud solves a lot of these problems and you'd think there's a market opportunity for them to step in and offer their enhanced IRC experiences to "teams" and "communities" with an appropriately optimized fee structure.

Why not just email?

Email implies a different sort of latency.

If I want to ask my coworker René for a quick bit of knowledge, a phone call is too disruptive and too urgent, and an email might not be answered for a few hours. Slack/hipchat/irc are the perfect medium for "hey, do you know off the top of your head why X is Y?"

Sometimes I fail to answer slack messages for a good chunk of time, with email I only have to pay attention to one notification and can handle all communication from the same interface (and you have to use email anyway). I don't think there is anything inherently slow about email, or that firing off one without a carefully crafted subject would be bad manners. Might be a personal preference, nevertheless I don't think there is any technical advantage in using an instant messaging service.

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