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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

IRC is rarely used compared to Slack, with its 10 million users.

I used it daily for decades, but let's not forget netsplits, nick collisions, zero log history (without a bouncer, and then you need a place to run a bouncer!), no file-sharing in a NAT world (dcc stopped working a loooong time ago), and no integration with any other apps, and on and on.

Don't get me wrong, I wish there was an open-source project that built a big group chat system that worked as well as slack and discord do, but it's a joke to say that irc is better than slack.

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Netsplits happen once in a blue moon nowadays (on freenode at least), nick collisions are also solved (you can register your nick on freenode and other networks), and you can totally set up logging on your channel and unlike Slack it won't disappear after 10,000 messages. You can also make it accessible through the web so people can easily see past history.

File transfers are definitely an issue over IRC but https://send.firefox.com/ solves that problem very well. For sharing code, there's gists (which I often send directly through my code editor which makes it seamless).

So, what client just allows you to join a channel and scroll up without having to learn the idiosyncrasies of a bot? Now, how do you search every channel on the instance?

I'm curious if someone has figured this out in the interm.

(My current hope lies in Mattermost, honestly.)

My chat logs are just plain text under ~/.weechat/logs and I search them using rip-grep. Works really fast. I am guessing a nicer interface like IRCCloud or TheLounge can work like Slack for searching, file/snippet hosting etc in a more approachable manner.

So, you come to a new job and join a channel that has been around for 2 years. Design decisions and discussions from 4 months ago with the old tech lead are there. Does weechat give you access to those logs?

No, not by default but if your organization uses IRC then it would be near guaranteed that whoever set up the IRC server will enable logging on all channels and then likely give you a web front end to it so you can easily read and search through all of the history.

In other words, yes, in any reasonable environment you would have access to everything ever said in any logged channel.

So, someone is tasked with building and maintaining a small part of what Slack provides as a service?

I agree to what nickjj said but hopefully decisions like that are not taken in chat but rather on a mail or an issue so it is documented.

>netsplits, nick collisions

It really sounds more like you used IRC daily decades ago.

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