I fail to see how those things should be part of the protocol. That's like complaining HTTP doesn't support tags for your bookmarks. It's so out of scope.
Unless, of course, you are talking about a user-friendly service offering IRC access to those who do not want to set up their own clients.
So, something like IRCCloud, which does exist, fyi.
Infinite scrollback is only possible with support from the protocol: if you assume that partitions happen between two servers or between the client and the server, then the client will not be able to see every message that happens so cannot provide the scrollback.
I can’t convince my colleagues to use IRCCloud at least people will put up with using slack.
Rocketchat has much more feature parity to slack tbh. Comparing slack to IRC isn’t really fair even though they do the same thing.
I have used irc and slack and slack’s ease of use is its asset. I used freenode in high school and college to teach myself scheme. The barrier to entry is not something that can be explained as just use IRC.
IRC is an open protocol. Messages like what you see can be hidden by the client or suppressed by the server. And free intermediary servers can keep logs.
It's amazing to me how people think Slack is this amazing tool. If someone had thrown millions of dollars at IRC, it wouldn't suck.
But instead, you'll fork over your personal info and insist I do too.
Unless, of course, you are talking about a user-friendly service offering IRC access to those who do not want to set up their own clients.
So, something like IRCCloud, which does exist, fyi.