prawnsalad

I used to have an extension live after it being reviewed, sent them an update a few weeks later, and they took down the old version without warning because the original reviewer didn't do something correctly (from what I can remember). I then had to wait a week before they could review the update and put it back live again by which point, a large portion of the userbase had disappeared and all our marketing efforts gone to waste for an entire week.

Never again would I deal with Mozillas reviewing processes.

I’ve been running the open source kiwiirc.com project for around 7 years and have always been very careful of who has access to what and so far has been clear of any issues. Hopefully I can now bring the same scrutiny and planning to IRC.com too!

https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway

I realise I'm replying in context of Sir_Cmpwn specifically (and I have had my own interaction with him in the past on unrelated projects in very sour taste) but it is more common with anybody that promotes an apologetic-but-contact-me attitude. It's an all to familiar trait of people trying to sound good in threads of their topic.

Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway

Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)

Kiwi IRC actually implements this and has a ZNC module being released soon for it. Hopefully soon, other bouncers.

These type of specs and actually getting them implemented in clients and servers is exactly the type of things the irc.com foundation will be supporting.

These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard open way.

As for running a large IRC network, it's not just about the cost. It's the management, the running of the network, dealing with its users, etc. Protecting yourself from DDOS that still unfortunately happens amongst other attacks. It's not as simple as throwing it on "AWS/GCP for hobby scale money". (I say say that even though I don't run freenode).

Andrew is very passionate about IRC as you can see from the post. Most people developing IRC projects do it in their spare time which makes progressing them difficult. This was my personal position back in November. Since I was hired, I have been able to work on Kiwi IRC, introduce many new features and grow the project, all while the project is still open source. The biggest part - Andrew/LTM does not own kiwiirc. That is purely a separate project that he wanted to grow and he did so without taking ownership of it.

I have always been pushing for open sourcing projects - especially in the IRC community as it needs projects to flourish to compete with alternative and closed sourced messaging systems. I am now starting irc.com with funding from Andrew and London Trust Media with the exact same mindset. Hopefully we can combine and push IRC standards with the existing IRC community - that is, existing IRC server and client developers that may not have anything to do with irc.com.

For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted. London Trust Media has had no interference with the running of the network and does not plan to, other than providing sponsor support to keep the servers running.

I believe other clients are starting to integrate this type of thing too - it's greatly needed

I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.

As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.

What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.

People use markdown as a text and word formatting system that is readable in plain text and easily transforms into HTML.

The the main point you are driving to people in this thread are the custom tags which goes against the plain text readability and adds extra complexity in this scope. You are competing against HTML preprocessors that are primarily used for that reason - to be converted into fully fledged HTML. Markdown is not in this scope by any means.

My main system right now is macOS with 2 screens. 1 Main screen for all my development/browsing with 2 desktops, personal+work. Second screen for things that are always there no matter what desktop the main is on, such as IM/email.

It's one of the largest web based IRC clients and currently getting a rewrite at the moment, but we've always had a lack of design input unfortunately.

A lot of the core group all work on different competing projects, servers and clients, and do frequently discuss any proposal made by anyone if it makes sense.

Developing kiwiirc.com over the past few years to cover many different IRC servers in all different languages and using many different services/auth services has been a real pain. It won't improve overnight but these IRCv3 extensions making their way into many different IRC server projects are really helping to smooth things out.

There is currently a re-write of the Kiwi IRC project to experiment and make use of the entire IRCv3 extension set, along with some other features to make web based IRC clients just as friendly and modern as people expect from messaging applications today. This will be a huge boost to the millions of people using IRC via Kiwi IRC.

IRC is getting interesting again and IRCv3 is up there making a lot of this possible.

Anything that simply uses the projects APIs is not bound to the same license. If this were not the case, then companies using MongoDB would have to be releasing all their project code, including Google / Ebay / EA / Sage / anyone else listed here: https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb

If all these high profile companies are OK with using an AGPL project without turning their projects open source, then I'm sure it's legally fine to do so in practise.

This isn't a script at all but a way to call an RPC method. And over a non duplex connection at that.

I often use something very similar with a few additions to support callbacks. Add an ID field so that responses can be matched and you suddenly support calls being made over a duplex connection such as Websocket or TCP connection;

Shorthand and longhand formats complicate things so stick with one type. The whole $ prefixed params are also un-needed, especially if your'e expecting them and have the important values under your own expected keys anyway.

But then after all this you start turning into json-rpc.

Restarting is just ignoring the issue.

I know some Promise libraries have an option to report unhandled errors which makes life a lot easier but there really should be something natively too.

The FAQ page had always mentioned that resources were shared unless you paid for the premium service. Yes, it could have been a lot clearer, but they have never out right denied it as many people seem to be making out.

People complained that their FAQ and information pages were not up to scratch to explain the details behind their network. So they update it with more information and now people complain that they updated it? Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

The service they provide is obviously targeted at non-technical users so it is completely understandable why they wouldn't be mentioning the technical details. This scares and baffles the users. If they were purposely deceiving the users with flat out lies then that wold be another thing but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

The exploits are serious and extremely stupid in the way they had developed launching the binaries and people should be made aware. However it does seem like Hola is getting a lot more flack than most others would.

It was only recently that they started requiring the user auth for the proxy access, earlier it was a free for all without any auth at all. Now they have the option to track which accounts are causing traffic on their network and potentially put a stop to them (not that is isn't difficult to get around)