Ugh no. IRC was great in its day, and I'm sure there are things today that it's still good enough for, but at work, I vastly prefer Slack (and possibly other similar tools, but I haven't power-used any of them yet.) I've been a very, very regular IRC user up until a few years ago. I wouldn't want to go back.
With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution. No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June.
No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible without clicking a link or DDC-sending things.
No custom emoji, e.g. for making alert messages easier to scan (like, aws icon, server icon, triple exclamation mark -> EC2 instance(s) have issues and someone should check this right now).
Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know. Last time I checked, securing channels was a very cumbersome interaction with some custom network bot.
It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered. We do that a lot.
No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did this, everyone else don't bother" or for thumbsup-thumbsdown voting on lunch places or for some sometimes-much-needed comical relief. We use gifs very, very seldomly, but they, too, are great for some comical relief.
No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary, details in thread" – extremely useful.
No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact (and see the edit history if needed) – great for "oops wrong channel", "i copy-pasted the wrong numbers", etc.
Yes, some could be improvised on IRC in some way, others could be replaced by lots of redundant messages, and if everyone agrees to use the same client (like irssi in tmux), and you sink enough time into hacking your ircd, it might even come somewhat close – but I vastly prefer the ready-to-use UX candy. Well worth the cost of the Slack premium package, IMO.
>It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered. We do that a lot.
> With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution. No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June.
With the ability to stay online 24/7, why would you go offline? My work machine stays on all the time and I had no problem scrolling back through messages that were sent when I wasn't there. As for the analysis summary example, how easy is it to search for a post that was made half a year ago? Would it be easier to find if that had been sent via email?
> No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible without clicking a link or DDC-sending things.
With my current settings using Slack, I have to click on the image link to expand it. Otherwise, I would have a window with multiple animated gifs running in the background to serve as a signficant distraction. Slack also seems to have a low limit on the number of lines you can post in a code snippet. At least a lot lower than what pastebin allows in my experience. And the new WYSIWYG editor made posting them far more annoying than using pastebin and pasting the link.
> No custom emoji
I actually disable rendering them with my current settings in slack. For :), I see :slightly_smiling_face: instead. Animated emojis, like gifs are distracting to me.
> Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know.
There's nothing that prevents applying company security policies to the servers that are running ircd on site. On the other hand, if Slack suffers a data breach, then what will your company do?
> It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered.
Not everything needs to be sent via a HTTP request. There are plenty of tutorials out there to write a simple IRC bot that can handle the scenario of sending messages to an alert channel. This blog compares the Slack way with setting up an IRC bot: https://drewdevault.com/2018/03/10/How-to-write-an-IRC-bot.h...
> No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did this, everyone else don't bother"
What's wrong with just sending an actual response?
> No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary, details in thread" – extremely useful.
Threads? If I want threads, I would stick to email or usenet. Websites like this one and Reddit largely implemented threads correctly such that they're useful. Websites like Slack and Facebook did not. Having a single level thread under a response with multiple subtopics within that thread makes it much harder to follow what's going on in an otherwise threaded conversation.
> No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact
I've always used the convention of posting a sed style subtitution command right after I realize my error. E.g.,
s/subtitution/substitution/
I think it's easy enough. A different convention is to just post the correct spelling with an asterisks. Every chat client I've seen worked that way without any issues and people understood what the correction was for.
FWIW, I've used IRC, AIM, MSN messenger, and other proprietary messaging clients and platforms and none have been as sluggish and unintuative to use as Slack.
> FWIW, I've used IRC, AIM, MSN messenger, and other proprietary messaging clients and platforms and none have been as sluggish and unintuative to use as Slack.
You think slack is bad, wait until they force you to switch to teams.
You might be interested in weechat-slack. I use it for 90% of my slack needs, I only run the client so I can use the video/phone feature to pair with a coworker.
There is also a slack mode for emacs.. and also ripcord.
Slack will never bring back the IRC gateway, so these are our best solutions.
IRC hasn't gone anywhere, if you want to host a server for internal company use (or public use if you don't mind the bots) feel free to spin one up - or use freenode or whatever, they're still around.
But slack's strength for me comes from decent unfurling of links, threading and history searching - I could live without threading, but link unfurling is a hill I'll die on.
Away after botnets (and later dogecoin) figured out its a free decentralized comms platform and caused every major enterprise to block all IRC ports out of fear of being owned. At least this was my experience in the early 2000s, which is why I gave up on IRC circa 2006-ish. The death kneel was the lack of a google/apple cloud-backed IRC app, so any mobile use of IRC was pretty much a death wish for your battery (this may have changed but meh damage has already been done). Also all of dividebyzero's reasons listed above
Otherwise, all the major networks are still around and two or three of the really really really hardcore old school users from the 90s may still be around. I still ask random geeks I meet if they used to hang in #FreeBSD back in the day, hoping to reunite with old peoples.
>The death kneel was the lack of a google/apple cloud-backed IRC app, so any mobile use of IRC was pretty much a death wish for your battery (this may have changed but meh damage has already been done).
Not really. Google/Apple also have a connection (or more) open to their servers, but IRC would kill the battery? It's the usage, not that the connection is open.
Yes, really.. because IRC sends traffic all of the time over the connection (PING? PONG!) so your client is always reacting rather than using a cloud-based service to keep the connection alive and only relay specific messages to your device.
IRC is devastating to your battery and back in the 2006-2008 times no one created such a service and thus no one could IRC on the go without a hot phone a dead battery after 2 hours.. pretty limiting to a communication platform if I would say so myself
With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution. No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June.
No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible without clicking a link or DDC-sending things.
No custom emoji, e.g. for making alert messages easier to scan (like, aws icon, server icon, triple exclamation mark -> EC2 instance(s) have issues and someone should check this right now).
Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know. Last time I checked, securing channels was a very cumbersome interaction with some custom network bot.
It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered. We do that a lot.
No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did this, everyone else don't bother" or for thumbsup-thumbsdown voting on lunch places or for some sometimes-much-needed comical relief. We use gifs very, very seldomly, but they, too, are great for some comical relief.
No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary, details in thread" – extremely useful.
No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact (and see the edit history if needed) – great for "oops wrong channel", "i copy-pasted the wrong numbers", etc.
Yes, some could be improvised on IRC in some way, others could be replaced by lots of redundant messages, and if everyone agrees to use the same client (like irssi in tmux), and you sink enough time into hacking your ircd, it might even come somewhat close – but I vastly prefer the ready-to-use UX candy. Well worth the cost of the Slack premium package, IMO.