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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Just a heads up we do async chat all the time here at my office, but we use Skype instead of Campfire. I don't want anyone to feel like they need to pay a monthly fee to get that service. Skype does persistent chat, you can add people to rooms and they remain persistent as well. You can 'favorite' rooms to keep them sort of pinned in one spot in your list of active convos. It's handy.

http://cl.ly/2d3d1M072M1H1h3P1A0i

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We use Skype too.. and it's fine. By fine I mean, it sucks.. but it's a chatroom so we have very few needs.

Wanted to correct something. Skype's chat is NOT persistent (if I'm wrong, lemme know.. I'd love to find out there's a feature I'm missing). That is to say, the chat persists.. but only on the distributed hosts that participate in it. So if I sign off at 10pm, and wake up before any of my team members are signed on at 7am.. I won't see anything that happened in between.. until one of them signs on.

This feature alone is probably worth the price of admission to Campfire, IMHO...

Yeah that's seems correct. You won't receive a message until you're both online. We use it here at work for interstate chat and it works well as we have our work machines on 24/7. So logging in from a laptop off site will sync the messages. Note that the read status doesn't get synced.

Skype is really terrible imho. If you're looking to move away from skype because it sucks, you can try an XMPP server + Candy, or an IRC server plus CGI:IRC or qwebirc.

Both solutions take about 15-20 minutes to set up and cost nothing, provided you have a VPS to host the server on.

I'm tempted to move to IRC...does it persist messages? I assume so, based on the discussion above. I'm quite sure that when I've used IRC in the past I haven't been able to see what has occured after I've left a channel but I imagine if I run my own server there is a simple solution to this problem. Anyone care to share (though I'm Googling as we speak)?

It does not! But the usual way people get around this is connecting to IRC using an IRC bouncer or irssi on a server somewhere and then connecting to that. This way you are "online" the whole time. But it's a thing everyone has to set up individually.

The other way it's handled is by having a bot sitting in channels (doing things like pushing warnings and error notices from your server, too) that records logs. Then you can visit a webpage that the bot hosts with the transcripts on. I'm sure there are packages that perform the logging directly on the server and host them, but it's useful to have some unlogged rooms, too.

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