Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram
I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can.
Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.
Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it 1000x easier to onboard new users
I don't see a problem. You don't give beginners enough credit. We were beginners once and we managed it just fine. If anything beginners today are cleverer than us :)
> Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history
Is this actually something people do? For one of my channels I had stats generated from the logs and ability to search the entire log. I'm sure that could be trivially setup nowadays with Elasticsearch or something. If you control the server you can guarantee you'll catch every message too and won't lose any in a netsplit.