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Comment by nuclear_eclipse | Hacker News Reader

Not to be negative, but what does this have that couldn't be done better with ZNC and a proper IRC client? I get a persistent connection to the IRC server, logs and push notifications to my phone when I'm not connected or paying attention, and I can connect from as any IRC client I want to, or connect from multiple clients simultaneously. [1] Granted, the web client does look really really nice, but as a whole it seems like an inferior solution to me.

I would really love to see that web client made so that it could connect to any server or bouncer, and not just your own proprietary backend.

1: http://noswap.com/articles/irc/

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Main advantages are:

  1. Accessible to those who don't have expertise or interest in setting up their own IRC bouncer
  2. Usable from any web browser
  3. More friendly UI
  4. Usable by sites that want a chat room for their users (look at twit.tv -- embedded IRC client front and center).

There is no proprietary backend; the whole client, and the library powering it (node-irc), are open source.

Sorry, perhaps "proprietary" was a bad choice. What I meant was that I would appreciate if the web client itself didn't require or rely on the nodejs/mongodb backend, and could instead operate directly on top of an IRC server or bouncer.

Ie, I would like to run your web client on my machine, have it connect directly to my IRC bouncer (or directly to a remote IRC server), and not require a local database to use it. I'm interested in using it as just another IRC client that connects to my IRC bouncer, rather than it being my primary IRC client. From what I see, this isn't possible.

I would have loved to have this when I worked at a company that only allowed HTTP(S) through the firewall.

My point is there are already plenty of pure web IRC clients that don't rely on a local database; none of them (that I've seen) have any sort of nice interface like this does. There are also plenty of applications that will proxy non-HTTP connections over HTTP proxies. Corkscrew [1] also allows you to tunnel SSH connections over HTTP proxy, and you can use SSH to tunnel just about anything else you need.

I'm aware there are other solutions. Compared to all the work I did to properly tunnel SSH over HTTPS (it was a pretty good firewall, apparently), deploying a node app is trivial.

If you (still) think a IRC bouncer is a good tool then you'd be surprised by something like quassel :)

http://quassel-irc.org/

I actually looked into Quassel a while back, and although it looks interesting, the biggest issue I had with it was the apparent inability to mix existing IRC clients into a Quassel setup, not to mention it lacks a unified set of notifications.

With ZNC on my server, I can connect any standard IRC client to it, whether its Irssi or Weechat running in screen on my server, Xchat on my desktop machines, or AndChat on my phone. I also receive only a single push notification to my phone when I get mentioned or PMed, and can literally connect from anywhere to respond.

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