I think if you make it clear the channel is logged it's the best you can do, since they can choose to partake in the conversation or not. No forcing function. The downside comes when you've a Netsplit and you lose one side of the conversation.

It does surprise me that some people are supporters of open source, but aren't supporters of open and transparent communication. Seems like a miss.

I haven't seen netsplits since my teens and I'm 36.

they happen regularly on efnet, occasionally on freenode. Presumably they don't occur on mozilla irc since it's a single node?

If it is a public channel, then I think it should be logged. (People who do not want their messages logged should send them privately to the recipient instead; you can still use IRC for this).

A command for receiving the log may be helpful to have though as an optional extension.

I can't see why anyone would want that. If you weren't connected to the server then those lines were not sent to you. They're ephemeral. Ask someone to fill you in on what happened or send you a log.

Because chat is not ephemeral? It’s an asynchronous communication method like sms, im, email, and snail mail of old. When I send a text to a friend at 2am I don’t expect a response right then. I expect that their phone will be muted and they’ll see my message in the morning and then they can choose if and when to respond back.

This is how literally all my peers think.