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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months.

Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.

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I don't know if you ever used IRC to get help on technical issues, but I've done that a lot, and going back to figure out what the solution was to a particularly thorny technical problem that someone told me about years ago has been something I've done multiple times.

Yeah, let’s just spend 30 minutes grepping the IRC logs!

If you have the logs as text files, then there's literally nothing you could be doing better. Want to index them? Turn them into a database? Use fuzzy search? Grepping? Everything is possible.

Therefore I don't understand your sarcasm. What's the alternative? If you find Discord's search feature good, you could implement it on top of the text logs.

There are fancy gui's to search in text files even on linux.

Why would it take 30 minutes? Maybe in the worst case, but most of the time it would maybe take a couple minutes to find the right thing to search for. And grep is pretty fast.

And even if it _did_ take 30 minutes, that's _way_ better than blowing a day, week, or even more time rediscovering the information contained in the log.

s/minutes/seconds/, but... yes? Let's just grep the IRC logs?

try ripgrep. You're welcome

This perspective is internally consistent but reveals why IRC struggles without better logging support - the sort of person who is connected and savvy enough to keep logs does fine. Doesn't need them. The people who use IRC are comfortable with that lack.

But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.

I worked in a global team. When I got booted off VPN I would have my irc connection drop and I would miss critical conversations. IRC sucks for collaboration.

You could just use an IRC bouncer.

But, yeah, I understand this is beyond the capabilities of your typical user, and not something most users even know exists.

This is really a UI/UX deficiency of IRC, not a functional deficiency.

I couldn’t imagine joining a workplace only to be told that I had to maintain a service to participate in essential communication channels.

Exchange servers anyone?

If my workplace made every employee run an Exchange server rather than IT running one for everyone, I'd leave

So you're saying an IRC daemon for corporate use needs a competent administrator, which is true of most daemons in business situations.

I disagree that it's merely a UX deficiency, but I agree that it's not a protocol deficiency. Yes, indeed you could just use an IRC bouncer: the problem is that many users don't have easy access to such a bouncer. What IRC "needs" is a network of open bouncers that users can subscribe to.

So IRCCloud?

Could it just be a donkey image that spins up with the convenient bits in place?

I have a hard time imagining irc heads don’t have a solution dockerized

I had a bouncer (with push notifications!), but I was in the minority.

Context of the current or recent chat when joining a channel would be in irc

"Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web"

Camfrog video chat has been around since the beginning '00s. You could put as many video feeds as you could fit on your screen, with 20-30FPS streams, and good sound quality. Granted, resolution was 352x288, but for seeing and talking, you don't really NEED much else.

Discord, meanwhile, can't keep a reliable WebRTC stream going.

I used Roger Wilco and Ventrilo until Mumble came out. I haven't given Discord a try because it's smothering, obsessive integration just rubs me the wrong way, like Teams.

Once every 5-10 years, I look through the logs I have that aren't on textfiles because the statute of limitations hasn't run out and relive a little of the history of how certain things came to be.

Those chats are an ethnography waiting to happen. You'll wish you had yours one day.

No, you definitely want the IRC log from when a vendor was helping you troubleshoot the frobnosticator with the wonky LED panel, because 10 years from now you'll still be using that same tired old frobnosticator and the LED panel is going to go wonky again.

It is not like hosting a mumble server was a difficult thing to do.

And some communities had it setup for you so it is not something that each user had to do.

>host your own server like Mumble.

Or use one of the public ones.

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