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by danpalmer 3820 days ago
Clients on the other hand are somewhat lacking for IRC.

We use Slack in a company of ~30, and while all the devs could easily use IRC, most of the rest of the company would struggle with it, and certainly wouldn't be able to communicate in the wide variety of ways (uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc) that they do now. Slack is great at making all those rich media types 'just work', and while it was possible with plugins to some IRC clients, the UX was prohibitively bad in my experience.
4 comments
wcummings 3820 days ago
>Clients on the other hand are somewhat lacking for IRC.

>(uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc)

Slack is really just a rich-text jabber client.

"Use IRC" isn't a very strong suggestion for a business, what really gets me is seeing open source projects using slack. I even had a casual IRC channel I used to frequent migrate to slack, smh.

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lwhalen 3820 days ago
That's a fair criticism. I know https://grove.io/ does great work in making 'real IRC' available to the masses, but it's still hosted. It would be nice if they would release their web-client as open source, or if someone wrote an OSS clone.
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LinuxBender 3819 days ago
Take a peek at convos (web IRC client frontend) https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos for a persistent web client. It uses redis to maintain state.
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cballard 3820 days ago
On one hand, you're completely right, on the other, I wish I could block all GIFs from Slack (or just not get notified about them). That kind of thing doesn't help me get work done, which is what I'm at work to do - not to share funny pictures.
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thomastuts 3820 days ago
That seems more like a Slack setup issue than an issue with Slack itself, to be honest. We have a separate #random channel for stuff like that and have turned off notifications for it. It's still there, but it's much less intrusive.

You might also want to check out the settings in the Messages & Media section, specifically "Expand links to images, video and audio from external sources". That might help to disable the inline GIFs, although I haven't tried it myself.

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danpalmer 3819 days ago
Yeah of course, blocking gifs is entirely reasonable. However the rich media and ease of use is well worth the money to us. If we were a company of only developers then maybe IRC would suit us better.
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