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Comment by StreamBright | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of my IRC client.

I wish I could use my IRC client: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539857

You can. See my top-level comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618630

I mean I wish we just stopped there, IRC, done, call it a day, never ever think about many to many written communication ever again. It works, scales, supported on all platform, text based, small memory/cpu footprint. Just like we stopped developing hammers a while ago. CS is the only field where 1.0 is never good enough. We keep "innovating" adding features that nobody needs and complicating things until it becomes this unmanagable mess. </rant>

As a big fan of IRC, I would have to say that it doesn't "work" at all when compared to Slack or Discord. You have to be online to receive messages, making it pretty much useless for any serious communication needs. Yes, I am aware of, and run, an IRC bouncer, this is not a real solution for 99% of users.

It's also limited to straight text. People may say it's frivolous, but sending pictures and other media is expected now.

Don't forget NickServ. It's a pretty massive user bottleneck. More than half of the people in my (tech) company would probably take more than 20 minutes to figure that out.

I used to spend a fair bit of time in a non-tech IRC (we've moved to Discord since) and the amount of intelligent people who simply could not get the hang of NickServ was astounding.

I've always wondered why IRC clients didn't add seamless integration with NickServs of large networks. Maybe this was one of the reasons why services like Slack or Discord are successful; these services are taking your hand and are guiding you through everything, while IRC expects the user to read RFC and diagnostic server output in order to figure what's going on. I don't think it has to be this way.

IRC as a protocol probably can be used to build a service as friendly as Slack. I.e. it's not a problem to add URL autoexpansion, like in this WeeChat plugin: https://github.com/antekone/youtube-autoexpand . Of course it's not easily possible or practical to show pictures inside of the terminal window, but I think it's entirely possible to create a new modern Slack-competitive IRC client over a pure IRC network. What could be done on IRC can be seen in an old Microsoft app, Microsoft Comic Chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat .

(disclaimer: i prefer IRC to Slack/Discord but I get why for many people IRC is a bad idea)

NickServ always felt like a terrible hack to me. It doesn't help that some major servers have incredibly stingy limits on NickServ too. I've had usernames age out after only a week, and the registration process is fairly cumbersome. Plus it involves sending a password in plaintext over the network, which never felt good.

IRC is not limited to plain text. Discord, Slack, and IRC all handle media the same way. Someone sends an URL and the client decides to how to handle displaying it. Textual shows me images and videos all the time from URLs sent.

That's not how I use the feature at all. The vast majority of images and files I send are created locally. I can then upload or paste then into the chat client, they get stored on the server and shown to the other users. With IRC, I would need to use a separate service like imgur to first upload the images. And or a file hosting service like Dropbox for the files.

A robust IRC client could include integrated image hosting. Or ask you to plug in your Dropbox account, and then upload there automatically when you drag and drop a file or image.

Have you seen irccloud?

I guess then technically IRC servers need a way to have images uploaded and re-serve them. When I share an image on slack I'm usually just uploading it directly to slack, rather than using imgur or another uploader.

I thought they stored the graphics on the server with Discord. I know there is that out-of-band file protocol that some IRC clients support, but it was always a terrible hack that hated firewalls.

That's incorrect - you can send binaries over IRC with DCC.

Unless things have changed since my IRC days, doesn't this a) require routed ports, so anything not a private controlled network is out, b) expose your IP address, which is a security risk, and c) is 1:1 only. It's also more of a side protocol than actually being part of IRC, right?

Whereas posting images directly into the chat window and having everyone see it is insanely useful.

It does not have full slack-like functionality. But it was never limited to just text. Some of the biggest communities on IRC revolve(d) around file sharing over DCC.

Anyway I think saying that it's "insanely" useful is a gross exaggeration. You know what is insanely useful though? Having open source clients and access to logs without paying $100 per year per user.

So, our small team is using google hangouts but that also supports image pasting (and is searchable, free).

Image pasting is for more than just memes. We can post screenshots of errors, or user data/visualisations, or sections of syntax-highlighted code. All of this is infinitely more agile than going through a bulky ticket system (which we also use once we’ve confirmed as bugs or decided how to use forwards). So no, it’s not an exaggeration at all.

IRC was fun in the 90s but seems to have stopped there? It was also never ~at all~ friendly for non-technical users, which is a complete non-starter nowadays.

The alternative to pasting images is making a ticket? I would have thought it would be uploading images to some image hosting site and then pasting a link.

Only receiving messages while online is a feature. Want to work async? Email.

Except some people can be having a conversation while I'm offline. When I get back on, I can catch up or have someone link me to an important part of it. It's handy.

I work with a bunch of people in oakland, where comcast flickers on and off like a light bulb during a wind storm in the 1920's. So the only way to have a quick chat is over email?

A feature to the small handful of people who still use IRC. Look around though. Everyone else expects basic features like being able to send someone a message even though that person went through a tunnel.

In some teams, IM+history is the email killer that happened by the mistake.

Many IRC servers provide a service that allows users to send messages to offline users, which are then relayed to the user when they come online.

Kind of a toothless "many" when this isn't even built into Freenode. I have to wonder if any IRC server I've ever connected to supported it and why I've never seen this feature.

Freenode does support it.

   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- ***** MemoServ Help *****
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- MemoServ allows users to send memos to registered users.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)-  
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- For more information on a command, type:
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- /msg MemoServ help <command>
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)-  
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- The following commands are available:
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- DEL             Alias for DELETE
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- DELETE          Deletes memos.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- FORWARD         Forwards a memo.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- HELP            Displays contextual help information.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- IGNORE          Ignores memos.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- LIST            Lists all of your memos.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- READ            Reads a memo.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- SEND            Sends a memo to a user.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- SENDOPS         Sends a memo to all ops on a channel.
   -MemoServ(MemoServ@services.)- ***** End of Help *****

It's a common IRC bot feature. Typically there's a command like: .tell <user> <message>

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