I don't know what fight you're fighting but we have other fights to attend to.
> image service
Now the data is outside, not an option.
> grep logs
How do you tell a designer to use grep on her iPhone? I can't even figure that out myself.
> use other devices for audio / video
And now what is the point of keeping IRC?
>> image service
> Now the data is outside, not an option.
The company can easily host it's own image service. The one I work for has had one for over a decade.
>> grep logs
> How do you tell a designer to use grep on her iPhone? I can't even figure that out myself.
How do I get a Slack client on my Nokia N9? Contrived examples can work both ways.
You can always paste a link to an image hosting service and launch the viewer as a separate application. I don't really see why viewing the image in the same application as the rest of the text is seen as an advantage. If it's inline, it would eventually disappear from the screen as more messages are posted.
> Can you rapidly search the history?
I can use grep on the locally stored log files.
> Can you customize alerts?
That depends on the client.
> Does it work reliably on mobile?
The IRC client I have on my Nokia phone works just fine.
> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?
Normally, you post a link to an image or pastebin service that shows the problem.
> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?
You would have to use a separate application for that. FWIW, I use Slack in Firefox and that feature (at least the last time I tried it), didn't work. I had to install chrome to get it to work.