Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kqr 3032 days ago
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.
2 comments
aidenn0 3032 days ago
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.
link
rspeer 3032 days ago
Okay. So why isn't IRCCloud better than Slack?
link
zitterbewegung 3032 days ago
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.

link
bphogan 3032 days ago
Disagree about barrier to entry.

I run an office hours chat for my online classes powered by IRC. I use KiwiIRC as the front-end.

Students need only the web address of the web page I want them to go to. When they get there, they need only a username.

No signup, no verification, none of that. They're online, getting help in seconds.

Individual public channels requiring nickserv registration and all that? that's another story.

But seriously - the barrier to entry to get started is this:

https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/?##irc_can_be_ea...

link
rspeer 3032 days ago
> cherryh.freenode.net set mode +ns ##irc_can_be_easy

Some welcome message. You may be too used to IRC to recognize this, but this is frightening gibberish to 99.99% of computer users.

Also, this interface does not get you crucial features provided by other chat services, such as seeing what previous users have said.

link
bphogan 3027 days ago
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.

link