I wish people used IRC instead of all of these proprietary tools. I don't love the Slack client, xchat is much better.
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...
* Service packages are poor replacements for fine-grained permission controls and registration.
* Always-connected clients are poor replacements for message history and push notifications.
* DCC is a a poor replacement for video chat, screen sharing, or file sharing.
* /whois and /away are poor replacements for user status tracking.
IRC had nearly 30 years to evolve and has not. It's time to move on.
That’s why IRC has away-notify, which does exactly what slack and co do for status tracking.
> * DCC is a a poor replacement for video chat, screen sharing, or file sharing.
That’s why people are working on an RFC for WebRTC negotiated via IRC.
> * Always-connected clients are poor replacements for message history and push notifications.
That’s why message history and push notification RFCs are being worked on, and already implemented in some IRCds (Snoonet transmits the last 5 minutes before login marked as such, for example, others transmit everything you request)
> * Service packages are poor replacements for fine-grained permission controls and registration.
That’s something that I hate, too, but some modern IRCds have far better permissions systems nowadays. Oh, and registration and login happens via a standardized SASL anyway, so you can also auth via OAUTH if you have to.
A reference implementation of a WIP RFC is rather different from a thing you can download and install and have working right now in a server that isn't likely to change their implementation in a way that makes those features unusable (since they're headline features being sold to enterprises).
There's also the fact that most IRC clients suck, with interfaces that look and control like xterm circa 1980. Fine for the people that read Hacker News, offputting for everyone else.
Do any of these RFCs or newer IRCd's support full message auditing for the legal folks?
SASL is nice, but unless you're into something like Okta or some other homegrown thing, most are going to use plain old LDAP/AD. And AFAIK, permissions on most IRCd's are still pretty spartan. There's no way to make a room visible to one class of users but not others, as there's either visible to all or invisible to all.
This is konversation in 2017: https://blogs.kde.org/2017/09/05/konversation-2x-2018-new-us...
The version of Quasseldroid I am working on right now: http://i.imgur.com/obsJDyg.png
Textual, a macOS IRC client: https://www.codeux.com/textual/public/images/v600media/Yosem...
> A reference implementation of a WIP RFC is rather different from a thing you can download and install and have working right now in a server that isn't likely to change their implementation in a way that makes those features unusable (since they're headline features being sold to enterprises).
That’s why the IRCv3 Working Group isn’t some people in an ivory tower, but actually the implementers – the developers of the largest IRCd implementations, and of all major clients cooperate to design and ship new functionality. This means that basically every client and server has an implementation by the time it ships.
> SASL is nice, but unless you're into something like Okta or some other homegrown thing, most are going to use plain old LDAP/AD
The guys at CoreOS have a simple single-click deployed system for bridging LDAP/AD for that purpose. Alternatively, RedHat also has a solution for that, and provides enterprise support for their product (Keycloak), too.
There are IRC solutions to this but IIRC it's something silly like a client that stays connected 24/7 to manage your user, then another client that connects to that client for your actual interface.
But that always has to happen in such distributed systems, Matrix has the same – your home node actually connects to the Matrix network, and you connect to that.
Even on XMPP you end up running an XMPP server somewhere which connects via federation to the actual network, and your clients just connect to that server.
Seems odd you would want to have you're internal company discussions hosted on a server outside your control. It's especially relevant to companies outside the USA who might not want to have their data under US law.
I wouldn't recommend IRC for office communication. XMPP is probably the better tool.
Our legal department wouldn't let us use Slack, for exactly this reason
What IRC client provides:
- inline image uploads
- multiline messages
- chat search, including messages sent while your client is offline
- pretty code formatting
- pretty text formatting
- file uploads
- user management
I know that IRC accomplishes something like 95% of what a team needs to communicate, but Slack absolutely shines at that last 5%. We currently use Hipchat, and it supports a lot of what I mentioned above, but it supports it badly and it hurts to use by comparison, when I'm in slack for other non-work teams.
We need to stop pretending that IRC is a good solution, and admit that it's only a "good enough" solution. It's an MVP you ship to prove to your customers or investors that you've got something, it's not a product you'd spend money to market.
It would be really neat to create a IRC server that bundled supported web, desktop, and mobile (ios and android) clients with first-class support for that last 5% of features, but I'm doubtful of how much money there really is to be made. People are cheap, and Slack is "free" - I mean, it's actually not free for the organization, but users don't pay a monetary price to download the client to use the system, so I see charging users money for high quality IRC clients as an uphill battle.
It becomes an alerting system, task tracker, logging system, code review system and I could go on...
IRC is for realtime communications, other Comms are better off on GitHub Issues etc.
My experience has been slack gets abused.
I haven't had this problem at all. We do have certain notifications trigger Hipchat alerts, but they also send out emails, etc. - Hipchat is just a convenience for that.
Maybe it's a Slack problem but not a Hipchat problem?
All of that exists, and can be used.
I was a huge proponent of IRC but the lack of developments the past... decades has killed it for me. Discord is straight up better. Yes it's proprietary, but no, IRC is just not a good alternative at this point, it hasn't kept up.
And I love to death what the IRCCloud guys are doing but it's just not good enough to use as a proper communication tool especially in a company.
Admitting this is the first step to fixing it. If you want open source alternatives to win, you can't get stuck telling people the things they like aren't worth supporting. I like the fact that I can do text, voice and video in the same tool; that I have a searchable message history; that I don't have to manage the server myself; that I can make interesting bots with a webhook system and a websocket API; that I can interact with people programmatically over an OAuth2 API; that I can use markdown in messages, embed files and youtube videos, pin messages; that I can manage large communities using a thorough group and permission system (I'm managing a Discord server that has 20k+ people on it, this is stuff that can't be done over IRC quite simply).
And you know what, I like the custom emojis too.
Quassel isn't good enough (speaking as someone who loves quassel). IRCCloud isn't good enough (speaking as someone who loves IRCCloud and heartily recommend everyone here to support them by buying a subscription).
I used to say: Our best chance is that Hangouts is open sourced. Nowadays, I'm rooting for Matrix but I think our best chance is that Discord is open sourced. These protocols, they get developed with very little awareness of what people actually want -- they copy features left and right, try to either support everything and end up a bloated or unusable plugin mess (XMPP) or support nothing and end up unpopular. Most of them are toys. In the end, we need serious players, passionate about creating not just protocols but good interfaces to them. This is hard to find in open source.
Your concept of "better" is distinctly different from mine. In my world, software without completely useless and unnecessary features is better than bloatware. irssi + tmux + logging + grep works great for 100% of actual not-embedding-useless-cat-videos-to-avoid-having-to-actually-get-work-done use cases.
In the interest of adopting your own borderline-uncivil tone: Stop assuming objectivity in your notion of evolution and improvement being the same as everyone else. It's not. Just stop. Please.
I respectfully disagree. It's incredibly helpful to be able to video/voice call a coworker instead of typing back and forth. It's also incredibly helpful to be able to quickly past a screenshot of an issue you're seeing, or to paste a quick snippet of code, or log, with nice formatting.
Yes, I could use my phone or another app, and I could paste my image to imgur and share a link, or point them to github - but that's another step, another roadblock on the road to communication and understanding.
In my experience it is pretty rare in software development to have the need for a voice/video call. There are use-cases but they are rare and better handled by a specific software.
> It's also incredibly helpful to be able to quickly past a screenshot of an issue you're seeing [...]
And also painful. Sometimes I get screenshots from terminal screens showing error messages and have to retype them when e.g. grepping for keywords in source.
> [...] quick snippet of code, or log, with nice formatting [...]
If it's short just blob it into the chat window. If it's long then please use some paste service, as screenshots of logs are a nightmare (see previous point).
> [...] but that's another step, another roadblock on the road to communication and understanding.
Why is there another step? You can have multiple programs, tabs, terminals, shells, sessions, etc. open at the same time.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Atlassian (Product Manager) and my feedback is genuine, coming from experience. I'm also super happy to see my ex-co-workers getting Stride out but my opinion is not a Marketing plot. Software now requires the collaboration of many different roles, many of them who would prefer Slack/Stride over IRC.
And in mine, it's very common! I lead a distributed team, and frequently it's easier and quicker to move from text chat to voice in order to explain something.
Why I'm working on copy-paste of images and long text for quassel.
Why people are working on WebRTC via IRC.
All this is coming.
If I have to install a special client (quassel) to access these features how is that any better than installing a XMPP client?
Only thing IRC has going for it is the existing userbase, most of who run clients that won't support these new features.
And we've got all the developers of all the major IRCds and cloents together, working on these things. In contrast to XMPP, where support for an XEP between clients is spotty, and in contrast to Matrix, where a single dev team runs the server with ~50% of global users, builds the clients, and servers.
I agree that XMPP is a better protocol, but with the people we have, we can, long term, change the IRC protocol, too.
Either way neat, and good luck. Like it or not, IRC is certainly going to be around for a long long time. It's going to be a long time before you get project devel/help channels to move elsewhere!
And when it gets here, then IRCCloud and Quassel would be a good answer to my original comment. But now, those clients don't provide those features, while Slack does.
And almost all functionality already is there anyway, as said.
The only company that ever funded anything for Quassel for example was Nokia. And that obviously ended ages ago, it’s all volunteers now.
Then it doesn’t matter how each client does it.
This already works between Textual, IRCCloud, QuasselWebserver, and a handful more.
I'm going to stick with the one that does the things that I want it to do now, and doesn't require me to hope that the other person can see what I'm trying to post.
There’s a major tradeoff to be made there.
Today, I'm in 10 and active in none. All the channels I left, even some of the ones I'm still in now, have switched to Discord, Slack or Matrix. The two only channels I care about are actually both mirrored on Discord using the excellent Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/).
I was a heavy IRC user. The audience is gone.
A one-click setup powers my IRC clients with multiple devices and logs even when I’m not online, powers a fulltext search ( https://gluu.kuschku.de/dl/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 ), powers a fully public logger https://gluu.kuschku.de/logs/ and much more.
All this exists, is free, and just works.
And there’s many more such systems that provide this functionality. From IRCCloud to many web clients.
re IRC it's not a hard problem to solve whatsoever