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iamsohungry

Meanwhile, IRC continues to work exactly as well as it has for 20+ years.

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IRC servers go down, too

Thats why you have multiple hubs and multiple client servers....redundancy!

IRC is decentralized, so a few severs going down is no problem.

netsplit isn't exactly what I'd call "no problem".

I suspect most internal IRC nets just consist of a single server

That's not exactly a point for slack, since internal slack nets don't exist. I call this "downtime as a service": you get all of the satisfaction an interrupted work day without any of the annoyance of being able to fix it yourself.

The flip side of that is with Slack, you have all the same problems as when your internal IRC server going down, but without the additional productivity loss of internal resources having to drop what they're doing to fix the damn thing.

I wasn't being 100% sarcastic. It's sometimes actually nice to use saas downtime as an excuse to take the day off without being the guy who has to fix it.

    sudo service ircd-irc2 restart

I'm pretty sure SSH-ing into the server and executing that command costs less in productivity than waiting for Slack to fix their issues.

A netsplit is just as annoying

Yeah, I don't see a need to have more than one server. Even at gigantic companies, you only need single servers per team. It takes very little to restart a server:

    sudo service ircd-irc2 restart

Meh, I'd rather have one server, honestly. It takes two seconds to restart an IRC server.

If you run your own, hardly. If theres a netsplit, it just means you'll have to wait a second until you're connected again.

But really, if you run your own IRC server in your own internal network, there will be no netsplits.

Instead, it goes down just like Slack.

But you can just go ahead and restart them, and they don't cost $5+ per person per month.

    sudo service ircd-irc2 restart

Fixed it.

"Exactly as well" meaning going down fairly often?

Indeed. It is frustrating that my co-workers have gotten so pissy when I asked them to fall back to the internal IRC server because Slack was so flakey.

Someone asked me just a couple days ago, why don't use use Slack instead of IRC?

This. IRC just works. It's not a walled garden.

Well IRC is able to go down just like Slack, especially if you're using a smaller/private network (I'm not going to run my organisation's 'Slack' on Freenode).

Again, as these things are, the tech has nothing to do with it. Hipchat 'lost' to Slack while being more or less identical (from a raw features/technical point of view). Hell, Slack could be IRC for all I know, but what makes people use Slack is more than what protocol it uses underneath.

> Hell, Slack could be IRC for all I know, but what makes people use Slack is more than what protocol it uses underneath.

Yeah, it's a combination of slavishly always having to be on the next new thing, and being unable to recognize that this is a problem.

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not ;)

Not sarcasm. I'm entirely annoyed with the software industry's constant attempts to make money off problems that were solved by someone else decades ago.

I'm pretty sure this recent instability won't make Slack go out of style. What will likely happen is Slack will continue releasing "features" that don't improve upon IRC and make their product harder to use, until someone else comes along with a simple IRC clone and unseats them just like Slack unseated HipChat. It's an exercise in pointlessness.

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