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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

Edit: looks like someone asked a similar question below.

I'm curious though.

What is it about IRC that makes it not a good choice? It seems to me that the biggest issue non-nerds care about is the user experience. And I feel that if people wanted to, that could be fixed. And if we really wanted to, we could extend IRC to do what we want and deal with its shortcomings.

I use a nice web gateway (kiwi) on top of an IRC channel for my student office hours and it's easy. They just supply a username and log in. No software to install, the UI looks nice, and students don't have to sign up for anything.

If I had the resources and the money, I'd focus on a good modern IRC client and server.

Am I wrong?

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> Am I wrong?

Yes and no. Setting up an IRC server is hard. Pretty much all IRC servers use arcane settings and configuration formats. I run an Inspircd and Hybrid servers, and for people who aren't used to it, it's really daunting compared to setting up something like prosody.

Services on top like Kiwi are nice. I run Shout IRC which is beautiful and slack-like, but again requires passenger and node to work, so lots of moving parts just for a web-ui.

Having said that, all of this is perfectly doable, it's just not so easy if you're used to dealing with something lightweight and a little php on top.

Yea. And isn't it funny though in an age of Docker and pre-made VMs that we still configure stuff?

Seems like a quick script would set all this up for us :D

A lot of ircds disgustingly put some config options in at compile time, including things like the servername. A friend of mine had her irc server give the generic name for her ircd for several months because she couldn't be arsed to spend the time to recompile and reconfigure.

Couldn't you just make sure that puppet/chef/whatever runs the right config options? Maybe a script that asks you for values up front and plugs them in?

i think the #1 value add from slack/hipchat is that it's hosted for you. we spend thousands of man-hours each month and year keeping our servers up. uptime is hard. chat is not hard. historical chat is not hard. when chat is down, your business is at risk. there's other services at my company we pay for that aren't very complicated - we just don't want to host it. paying $5/user/mo for chat that is always up is easier than keeping it up yourself.

your use case is very different, and i wouldn't expect any pay-for-chat service to make any sense for it

Makes sense.

Although I take issue with "when chat is down your business is at risk."

Pick up a phone. Use Skype. Send email.

Business was done for thousands of years before chat apps. :D

That works less well if, for some reason, your business is significantly built around chat (Live Chat for sales, for example).

It's perfectly possible to pivot your sales funnel, but it's not something you can do in two hours whilst the chat server's down.

So you plan for it. We just had this whole discussion on HN a few weeks ago when Mandrill changed and everyone was scrambling.

If you rely on a third party for business, you need to plan for it.

The rule always applies: You will pay now or you will pay later.

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