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Comment by aniketpant | Hacker News Reader

I came across Scrollback a few months back but I still wonder what problem is it trying to solve? IRC is not broken. And the IRC clients work just fine for everyone.

I would like to know more from the team about why they are building Scrollback?

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Besides the fact that most people new to IRC are completely intimidated, a good web client solves connection issues as well. I'm behind a university proxy, for example, and port 6667 doesn't work. Currently I ssh-screen-irssi, but if there's a really good web client out there I might switch to it (I hear irccloud is good, though I'm really beginning to like scrollback)

I'm also at a university that blocks 6667. I wrote a blog post on how to get around it.

http://siculars.posthaven.com/ssh-tunnel-to-blocked-sites-wh...

If you have a pedantic HTTP proxy, you can use ssh over HTTP(S) with corkscrew.

You might have to set up SSH on port 443, but this is guaranteed to bypass most filters.

Another good option is tethering :P

Kiwi seems promising, but I've experienced a number of frustrating bugs

> IRC is not broken. And the IRC clients work just fine for everyone.

...if they know what an IRC client is. Most people don't, and most people aren't going to bother installing and trying to configure some extra software just for a chat room on one weird website that won't get with the modern world and put in a web client.

Really? I'm looking across a number of special-interest and social channels right now, most having nothing to do with tech, and I can count one or two people in each who use a web client, despite the web client being linked from a popular web page for most.

I think that if you're going to have people using the web client with any sort of regularity, you really want to give up on IRC and implement something more modern. A new client isn't going to make it any more usable, nor add any new features that users can depend on.

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