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by overtmind 2713 days ago
Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope?

I use RocketChat for my consulting business for a few reasons that are largely unavailable on IRC without bots:

1) Rich text and syntax highlighting - Small properly fenced off code blocks are a wonder. Contrast that to IRC where it would never look quite right, relies on the other person's client to have monospaced fonts, and usually gets you yelled at for flooding

2) URL expanding - Viewing titles and a snippet of the content is useful. Requires bots on IRC.

3) File sharing in a trivial non-p2p. Nobody liked DCC, and I shudder thinking of going back to opening port ranges for that.

4) Reliability of having a central history which alleviates needing a bouncer, and reduces how important a stable connection actually is.

The only other thing you could come back with is to use yet other external platforms to alleviate those issues like:

For 1) An external public/private pastebin solution

For 2) A bot as I already said

For 3) An external filsharing service: Dropbox, Nextcloud, etc

For 4) External bnc: ZNC, bip, weechat, irssi etc

RocketChat, Mattermost, Slack, et al incorporate all of those things and more and are inherently useful - Plus, if you're the administrator you don't have to enable gifs or cat pictures, yes that shit is dumb.
1 comments
darkpuma 2713 days ago
IRC bots are trivial to implement and run so I don't consider many of these, which are commonly provided by IRC bots, as legitimate arguments against IRC. I don't consider "but you need a bot" to be a legitimate gripe.

Rich text is generally worthless except for code highlighting, but pasting large amounts of code into the channel is generally considered antisocial on IRC anyway, and pastebin services are used for this. It's not unusual for a company to provide their own internal pastebin services anyway, since it's generally useful with other systems like email. Ditto file sharing.

> "Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope?"

No, because in my personal experience that is OVERWHELMINGLY the most frequently used feature of slack/etc that's not present in IRC. For every time I've seen pasted code, I've seen easily a hundred inane pasted memes. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't earnestly believe it's the primary reason people prefer systems other than IRC.

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