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Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

Discord is the modern IRC. And at least you can see history there, unlike with IRC where it is just gone if your client fails.

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Discord search is unfortunately garbage in my experience, so it's almost like not having history.

What's your issue with it? I'm surprised how well it works, how you can search for something and quickly jump to the context.

I sometimes search for messages that I definitely said a few weeks ago, and it can't find it. In comparison slack's search is way more reliable.

Several people in this thread have complained about it, but I haven't had any issues.

It's O(log n), it has fuzzy search (e.g. noun/verb forms the same word), and you can add qualifiers like `from:Author#1234`.

I can normally join a Discord server for a project, search for a keyword, find someone else with the same question, and read the chat log from that point in time.

IRC is almost always logged, and if you need to log things yourself, you can use a bouncer or set up a server.

And if your bouncer or server fails? Where do you get the history then?

What if the discord servers fail and your history is lost?

Or if Discord decides storing unlimited history isn't something they want to provide to everyone for free anymore.

You put in a search engine network_name channel_name and hope someone else logged. If its a technical channel, someone almost always did and also did share it.

no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is more popular than IRC.

Not to say that Discord isnt deeply flawed in many respects, like client weight/resource usage, abysmal search (in server but especially DMs, coarse and clunky permissions systems, audit situation? and the very fact that using animated emojis will cost you 5 dollars per month is just stealing sweets from children, and their absolutely sickening boost (ponzi?) scheme...

> no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is more popular than IRC.

No, the reason for that is more likely that all the darn generation-Z kids are deathly afraid (and therefore pretend to be deeply contemptuous) of any old-fashioned technology created by Unix greybeards.

(Now geroffmylawn.)

At least with IRC, many would run bots which made channel logs available somewhere that could be indexed by a search engine. Doing the same with Discord will earn you a TOS ban.

IIRC, scripting your own account is bannable, so you can't download the contents of servers you join. But I don't think there's any prohibition on inviting a proper bot account to download messages, provided you have admin access on the server to do so.

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