Show HN: IRCRelay - Hosted IRC Bouncer Service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: IRCRelay - Hosted IRC Bouncer Service

ircrelay.com

30 pointsmitchellh44 comments

Making me enter payment info to try it out makes this a non-starter for me.

There's not enough information on the main page as to how it actually works or who is behind for me to be comfortable just plugging my credit card into a random site.

I like the concept, though, and would probably pay for something like this if there were more details on how it works. Right now, I have SSL/unlimited message archive/unlimited connections by using screen + irssi and a cheap (less than $12/mo) VPS.

I'm sorry to hear that. Here is a page about us and who is behind it: https://www.ircrelay.com/about

A high level overview of how it works: When you sign up, we provision a private ZNC installation on EC2 for you. It is multi-tenant, but we leverage various mechanisms for security: passwords are one-way hashed, each ZNC process runs as a separate unix user for each IRCRelay user, file permissions are such that no other ZNC user can read another users config even if there was an exploit, etc.

As for the payment: We only wanted to sign up people who were serious about using the service, and asking for payment details up front is a way to do this. All payments are done through stripe, and we don't see the CC details, ever. Your card is not charged until after the 30 day trial, and we send a warning email a few days prior so you can cancel your account if you're not happy.

But thanks for checking it out!

Since you are using a separate ZNC instance for each user, what are prospects of allowing users to install (or choose from a pre-selected list of) third-party ZNC extensions? In my case, I wrote a service-agnostic push notification module for ZNC [1] that I think would be a decent additional feature for you to compete with services like IRCCloud or TapChat.

1: https://github.com/jreese/znc-push

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that people who are even aware of what ZNC is would be able to run their own instance on a server under their control.

How do you handle the fact that most IRC networks limit the # of connections that can come from a single IP address?

In general its a nice service, it seems to cover all the IRC bases.

I'm wondering though if there is a bigger offering here somewhere, something which would basically provide a termination point for all of your real time interactive communication sessions. Paired with a set of tools that let you connect to that termination point from a variety of devices might unify a bunch of services that are currently fragmented.

For example, the various chat clients that federated AIM/Yahoo/Jabber were a way to terminate all your chat context and then to attach or detach from it at will. They still didn't get the "Oh I left my gmail running at home so your gchat went there and now opening gmail at work I don't know that you're wondering why I'm not responding" problem.

Clearly federating IRC, Chat, Twitter, and SMS could have some interesting benefits, especially if you're able to re-connect, back up the timeline to the point where you disconnected, and play back to present.

Anyway, IRC is but one piece of that puzzle.

I think bitlbee will let you cram your various non-IRC instant messengers into an IRC-like interface. I've never used it, but it seems like an easy first step.

I actually use bitlbee with ZNC on a daily basis, and there are some rough edges, like seeing users as giant numbers (G+ ids) when connected to GTalk if they aren't in your buddy list, but it otherwise works really well, and I'm always happy to centralize all my "realtime" communications into my IRC client.

I think there is an option to make bitlbee extract the handle from some other field, like "full name", then 05327fykex6h5yvd457 becomes JohnConner or whatever. Have a look at a recent version of the docs.

Yep, I already use that, but it only works for people in your Gtalk "friends" list or somesuch, so I still see that for anyone who contacts me that I haven't talked to previously.

This seems like a great idea, but I am absolutely not going to give credit card info at the beginning of a trial. Shame, I would have liked to try it out.

Honest question:

If they had asked you to pay for the service up front without a trial would it have made a difference?

Would it be better marketing to call it a "free month" instead of a trial?

I think that most people who might use this have some idea what an IRC Proxy is. That makes me wonder if it isn't better to just call it a free month to avoid these "why am I paying for a trial" issues.

No, and no.

The issue here is: 1. I have never used this kind of service before. 2. I am not sure I would be willing to pay for it. 3. I am exactly the kind of person who would pay $5 a month for the convenience factor. 4. I am also the kind of person who would completely forget to cancel and then get billed, even if I didn't use it.

Basically, a free trial with credit card info attached, for me, isn't a free trial, it's a post-billing situation.

We will send you an email before billing your card. We're also very open to fixing issues around accidental billing - sometimes I forget to cancel in time as well.

> We will send you an email before billing your card.

You may want to put that in very clear text on the homepage.

I know if I saw something like that explanation on the page asking for CC details, I would be much more likely to acquiesce. If you, say, offered a refund if someone emailed requesting one within a week(?) of their paid term starting, it would go a long way.

Interesting. I'm definitely going to add something around the fact that we'll a) remind them and b) be flexible in dire situations. Thanks for the feedback!

That's cool but for me it's also just as likely that I sign up for a trial and then use it once and forget about it, so having to go in and find out how to prevent billing and such is extra steps that simply shouldn't exist.

Frankly I don't see why it is a "give us your card up front" instead of a "Okay! Your trial is over and the service doesn't work for you anymore until you pony up!"

The latter is infinitely preferable to me.

Me and @mitchellh built this as a side project.

Really appreciate any feedback, and we're happy to answer questions here. Thanks!

I love the idea of this, but the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost when I can get a VPS for less.

EDIT: that said, I do normally only use 2 networks, and I'm fine with the first tier cost. It's just those occasional times I need to connect to a third network. Also I'm not sure how much 10000 messages is, but I imagine idling in a freenode channel could tear through that pretty quickly.

Neat. However, installing ZNC on your own an Amazon EC2 micro instance is cheaper.

Yeah, this really can't compete with irssi running in screen in some datacenter. Even less configuration involved.

Where do you send the notifications from irssi?

I run irssi in tmux on EC2 with a Colloquy push script (http://static.ssji.net/colloquy_push.pl.txt). Spent time trying to get it right, but Colloquy is flaky at best.

Yes, it is certainly cheaper.

You're paying [a very small amount] to IRCRelay for convenience and not having to worry about it. At least for my close friends, they'd rather pay $5 a month than deal with setting up an EC2 instance or VPS to do this for them.

I'm not looking to pick a fight with you, I'm just illustrating the thought process that goes into something like this (at least, mine). To help you understand your market better.

- screen and irssi is a far better experience than using a bouncer. Perhaps offer that? These services, back in the day, used to be "shell providers" for this reason.

- Most developers I know run their own VPS and probably wouldn't consider a service like this.

- I happily pay $20/month for my Linode wherein I do this, the big reason being I can also torrent, compile, host quick Internet stuff, do development work, receive mail, etc.

Administering a personal development machine is a gateway to becoming a better hacker these days, so I think you'll find that your market ends up being miscreants who have $5 to throw away on a throwaway bouncer to cause trouble.

I personally prefer a bouncer to screen+irssi because I like Textual for OS X so much :).

I definitely agree with your last point - the "irc types" also tend to the the "hacker types" these days.

I think my micro instance was $54/yr, and like you mention, I can do a lot more with it.

Not to mention that you can also get push notifications from ZNC to various services with my plugin/module: https://github.com/jreese/znc-push

HN won't let me respond to your other comment because it is too deep or something? Anyways, my response:

I'm very open to it, if it can be done in a safe way. One way to do this may be to just curate a set of ZNC modules (since there aren't tons) that are approved to be installed, such as your znc-push module. It looks like that sort of thing would provide a lot of value.

I'm surprised Amazon allow IRC on EC2. A sizeable number of VPS providers prohibit IRC usage; it makes them dDoS magnets and just isn't worth the hassle

Who doesn't allow IRC usage? VPS/ssh/screen/IRC seems to be one of the more popular reasons for private individuals to use a VPS (well, at least most people on IRC where I hang out seem to use a VPS).

I'd highly recommend checking out http://www.irccloud.com/

I've started using it as my full time IRC client with Nimbus https://github.com/jnordberg/irccloudapp

Not sure why you were downvoted. IRCCloud is a great service (though they've been experience trouble recently with a lot of disconnection issues randomly)

Two reasons:

1. Show HN is generally about feedback. The comment doesn't provide useful feedback about the service.

2. IRCCloud is a client and proxy. This service allows you to use your own IRC client which is preferable for a whole host of reasons (config, WM level keybindings, etc).

Aside from the down vote, In my experience IRCCloud has serious reliability issues. I've recommended it to around 10 people all of which have abandoned the service because it was down so frequently.

[EDIT] IRCCloud may since have corrected those problems it was > 5 months ago.

Downvoted possibly because of form, I've seen a number of down votes on comments to "Show HN:" posts that were essentially "This is better: competitive link." It doesn't help the person showing us their tool because the comment doesn't say how its better. A better comment would be "I'm currently using a competitive service X, and I really like features A, B, and C, but don't like features P, Q,and R, your product seems to fix P and Q, but doesn't offer B or C." which is evaluative against a competitive product (no doubt the poster has done those evaluations as well but its useful to have actual customers and their feedback.

It appears to still be invite only. I applied ages ago and never heard back, so I assumed it was defunct or they just thought I wasn't cool enough.

From the comments here I understand you provide a ZNC bouncer. You should advertise that, as your target audience is interested in those kind of technical details.

ZNC provides plugins as well, will I be able to use those?

I'd advise you to drop or heavily increase the 10,000 message limit. A moderately busy IRC channels would easily get 1,000 messages a day. Say I'd be on freenode's #ruby, #node.js and #python, I'd be able to use your service for 3-4 days at most with some luck.

The limit to what we store while you're not connected.- i.e, if you're on a trip for a weekend and you come back, you get all of your messages fed back to your client the next time you log in. This clears your limit back to 0, effectively.

On ZNC - definitely good feedback to have a "How it works" page or something of the sort for those who are interested.

I totally misinterpreted that. My apologies.

Speaking of IRC persistence. Subway IRC https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway

If you're an Android user, also check out my app TapChat: http://tapchatapp.com/

I do love your app. Haven't used it in a month or so, but the one thing that bothered me was how I could click on a message that contained a link, and easily view the link, but I couldn't click on the topic to do the same thing.

Mostly curious if anyone has ever mentioned that to you before.

Way too expensive. It's a damn bouncer heh.

I took about one hour of my time and set up ZNC on my openwrt home router. Since then I never worried about that...

As someone who got his start in SaaS (though we didn't call it that then) offering this exact service, Amazon is going to be very annoyed with you once they're handling DDoS attacks on your behalf.

Be selective of your clients and cut loose quickly. There are people who will sign up for your service just to go shit-talk on EFnet, and the wrong person will result in your entire service going down.

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