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Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

Explain me how this is better than IRC.

Lots of reasons. For example, you can't just paste a picture from your Clipboard into a IRC channel and expect it to work. Granted there are image hosting services out there, but if you want a chat server on your private network and you are a small company, you want it all in one. Same goes with highlighting mentions, Desktop notifications, saved transcriptions (IRC is transient by nature), LDAP/Kerberose integration, XMPP support (again, there are XMPP bridges for IRC, but not integrated in any free private IRC server I know of). UI is another aspect too.

IRC is a bit less accessible for non-technical people. We had a lot of trouble getting our team to adopt it. It's not for everyone.

That's why products like Slack, HipChat, Campfire, etc exist.

I don't want to dismiss your efforts, but in the spirit of the original question I'd like to know: Is it only a UI problem, or is there a problem with IRC (the protocol) itself ?

The lack of persistence built into the protocol (and thus clients) is a big problem for team communications. You can have a bot log your channel, but they'll often have holes creep into the logs somehow, and for private discussions require yet one more access control system.

Having a web irc client that provided a common backlog and search for all users, instead of requiring things like znc to make that usable, would be great. The private part is fraught though.

/query?

/query command is news to me, but appears to be completely unrelated (I don't really understand the naming).

It was definitely a UI problem for us. I don't think the underlying protocol matters much, we could have used IRC.

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