What happens when a topic of discussion is debated intensely on a different timezone and you wake up to more than 500 messages to read? Do you read them all?

I think this is a reason for people who really don't engage on IRC for anything other than "Hi, I have a problem, can anyone help me?".

If you do anything meaningful and engage on different channels you know there is no keep up with everything being said or discussed.

Sorry if I sound harsh but I keep hearing the same tiring argument and keep pointing people to the same thing over and over and over. If you want IRC and history, please use an IRC bouncer. With Docker and cheap hosting solutions it's almost a no brainer. Do one better, add SSL to your bouncer and connect to, at least on Freenode, using SSL as well. Win-win.

IMO this is one more example of a technical community being generally dismissive of the importance of user experience. UX is THE reason Slack gained the traction it did. And I don't just mean in the client, I mean also mean the experience of going from zero to having everything working with the expected bells and whistles and the experience of adding a new feature. There is real value in being able to set it all up in three minutes and a couple of clicks without having to learn the technical underpinnings of a platform well enough to bring up a server and find and configure a bunch of individual bots.

Microsoft has made billions locking people up in the name of convenience.

You can have these things if you care or you can use its simplest form. Don't want to use a bouncer? Use a web client.

People keep repeating OSS. But now OSS is more about having being recognized than really believing in it. Using closed source software is one point.

I'm no radical, I use a Mac and I shed a tear every time I have to use Lightroom because I haven't find the drive to move to Darktable or Sublime instead of Atom.

Anyone who wants to avoid the possibility of lock-in using Slack should be laser-focused on making IRC competitive rather than trying to convince people that poor UX is just the price of freedom.

Source: have been using IRC since late 1993.

This entire thread has been about whether IRC can offer a competitive experience to services like Slack, Gitter, etc. I don't think anyone is arguing that you cannot use IRC at all without tools but even you were just saying (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013780) that you need the money and skills to run a server to have a first-class experience.

> Source: have been using IRC since late 1993.

Ditto but the world has moved on quite a lot since then and many of us think that IRC needs to as well or it will continue declining into obscurity.

* Proprietary protocols are generally a bad deal, and especially so for open source projects. Proprietary clients (gmail, for instance) don't matter as much unless you are RMS.

* Chat should not be a central component of an open source project, but an 'extra' for occasional real time communications. If important stuff happens there, it will alienate people who can't participate because of time zones or other reasons.

Someone else wrote the comment you linked.

> * Chat should not be a central component of an open source project, but an 'extra' for occasional real time communications.

I generally agree that chat shouldn't matter enormously but the problem is that we don't really have a great free alternative. Slack has an interesting hybrid which is largely chat but with some elements which are closer to mailing list style (persistence, search, rich formatting, quasi-attachments) and the only other alternatives I see people regularly using are Google Groups or Git Hub issue tracker, neither of which are open.

The big problem is infrastructure: once we start talking about building a consistent experience with an open project, that means running servers, handling security and support work, etc. That's not a problem for well-staffed projects but it's an ongoing hassle for smaller projects. This would seem like a good place for a non-profit to provide infrastructure.

> If important stuff happens there, it will alienate people who can't participate because of time zones or other reasons.

Interestingly, this is a major reason I see cited in _favor_ of Slack. With IRC, you aren't involved if you weren't logged when a conversation started but with Slack you still receive notifications and can view or search the history.

I just can't possibly have the time.

Additionally, some of the problems are purely intractable, despite anyone saying any different. Further problems are social rather than technical.

I need a chat that works on all my devices, delivers messages to all my devices, keeps track of mentions (again, across all devices), has searchable history (yep, everywhere). Bouncers speak IRC in both directions when that makes absolutely no sense. It'd be like having a mail server speak SMTP instead of IMAP, no way to pull, only to get pushed at.

Even something like IRCCloud where they have their own protocol which is actually purpose-built, can't change fundamentals of how the protocol is and gets used in practice.

Presence is simply unsolved, and pretty valuable for obvious reasons -- so I can decide how and if to contact someone. To try to discern this on IRC I have to keep in mind, for every contact, do they use whois status, do they send away messages, do they use an away nick, or more probably none of the above.

Nicks being mutable but also used for addressing messages is beyond insanity. Sure, let someone decide to be "princess sparkles" for a day or whatever, but I NEVER want to have to figure out who is who in order to be able to open a query window, don't want an existing query window to stop working because they changed their nick for a joke in some channel I'm not in, I never want to split logs of messages with people based on whether they were john or john|break... etc.

Regardless of MY technical competency or capacity for burning time, I will still need non-technical project-helper person to be able to spend an afternoon to create a handful of Trello boards and channels, and make those boards' changes push to their respective channels.

And even though I myself can suck it up and jump those hurdles, I'll never get a majority of my friends or colleagues to do so. Never in a million years. And that alone matters more than any other complaint because as a chat platform, it's the network, stupid.

I use IRC all the time to talk with people who are experts in some particular technology, and need absolutely none of this infrastructure.

It's your choice if you want to read them or not. This is better than IRC, because IRC doesn't give you that choice.

Nailed it, IRC isn't a significant barrier for a real contributor. If you don't have the time to figure out IRC, you don't have the time to significantly contribute to a project.

Especially in a corporate setting, the result is a simple username/password login to a webpage or the mobile client, it Just Works™, and has a user-friendly interface.

And don't suddenly bite you at 10,000 messages. ;-)

Most open source projects can not pay for the archiving feature - so messages are deleted and gone forever.

They aren't deleted and gone forever. They're simply not searchable. If at some future point you decide to pay, your entire history is made available to you.

I realize that doesn't help projects who will never want or be able to pay, but it's an important point for those who might.

Most things in slack are available in some form with irc, but not preconfigured out of the box. And some things on irc can take some fiddling to get set up right, and you can't count on everyone else to have enabled support.

But I would love to learn how to do that, for example with ZNC which is online all the time.

That logs the logs in an SQL database, you can search with Quassel-Suche (a web-based search engine for quassel backends), and we have clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS (kinda) and Android (with a better Android client in beta) and a webclient.

You get contiguous logs like in Slack, Push Notifications (with the Android beta, soon), and you can search through your logs.

In fact, I don’t bookmark things in my browser anymore – I send them in a query to myself, and just use quassel-suche half a year later to find them, or, if there hasn’t been much activity in the channel, just scroll up (infinite scroll to load more logs).

There's also services like https://botbot.me that offer easy setup of this

How you search the created logfiles is up to you, znc is not a log management system, it merely creates.

But perhaps I'm wanting too much from a chat system.

What about all the integrations with other services?

Those things can be kind of cool for a company, but when I'm hanging out, on, say #postgres, it's to ask a question or discuss functionality, not see pull requests roll through the screen.

From this, it sounds like the only substantive difference you're hung up on is message persistence. If that's being provided by a stable third party (i.e. a log bot, the technical details of which are irrelevant), what else are you missing?

For end-user support people are still more than capable of using a desktop IRC client, as evidenced by the WEALTH of people that ask questions on #fedora, #debian, #ubuntu, etc every single day.

Oh yes that is definitely uber-geek.

Setting up Node-red on a VPS, and logging a dozen IRC rooms you're interested in, storing in a MongoDB, and creating a search DB... over TOR is being an "uber-geek".

And it took me 10 minutes to set up. No programming required, interestingly enough.

Ever seen IRCCloud or Quassel?

Simple "one-click" "just works™" IRC bouncers, perfectly integrating.