I am an old-time IRC user, but IRC is missing tons of features I use literally every single day in Slack. It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers. It does not keep history of discussions. It does not have media embedding.

It is very far from a solution in 2019.

"It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers."

I've never had a problem with DCC transfers, but I suspect I'm in the minority.

"It does not keep history of discussions."

Actually, there were several servers which had "MsgServ" bot which would remember your last logout time, and could go back to retrieve all those messages from its logs and auto-relayed them to you, all you did was ask it to replay missed content from x channel and you got it.

"It does not have media embedding."

If you used pIRCh98 as your client you had live video capability and could easily do a quick desktop share through OBS or similar software, but that did rely upon everyone using pIRCh98.

Slack is basically a modernized version of a mix of the best features that IRC clients and daemons and bot creators had.

The only thing slack hasn't seemed to copy yet from all the old IRC stuff is the ability to use mIRC as a desktop file system browser (that was fun to see being coded.)

If you have control of the entire IRC stack (the daemon, the bouncers, etc) you can work around a lot of those issues.. though at that rate, it's probably a lot less work to just host something like Riot..

How do you work around the lack of a kept history?

In our case, we didn't. Kept history wasn't a feature people used or wanted. Stuff you were going to refer back to later was for email.

As I said, I use this every single day of the week. Not having it means it is not even close to a solution.

Quassel, The Lounge, etc

Forcing each user to maintain an always-online machine is not really a good solution compared to just... having the history available to everyone, always.

If it's an internal chat system then the server admin just runs that second layer on top for those who want it, they're all multi user

You just run the bouncers on the same machine as the daemon.

This does not strike you as ridiculous, at all?

running 2 programs to provide another higher level interface? not really.

IRCd - real time, ram buffering of messages. Quassel - reads and stores buffers in a database, allows users to retrieve them.

Lack of history is a feature, not a bug. If you want persistent storage of decisions/etc there are better options out there.

It is definitely not a feature in most corporate environments.

Yes, like Slack.

Slack is more CYA than a store of knowledge. Yes, it's really great for pointing fingers: you can literally link to a specific message, saying "here, this dude made the call".

Again: I use it every single day. Not for "CYA". No need to be condescending.

Respectfully it seems like you may be condescending

> It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers.

If only there were some sort of Universal scheme for denoting the Location of a Resource. That would let you map a relatively short string to one of many possible file access services, and put that string in a text chat channel, rather than conflating two distinct problem domains.

Also every server I know and most clients do logging.

I am well aware of how to do this, yes. I do not find this a good solution.

So dial back the snark.

I concede the snark and withdraw it, but my point remains: one tool for one job. There are tools for sharing files, and URLs allow those files' locations to be shared over text channels. One tool for one job.

That is a tool that takes something like 10x the effort of having built-in file transfers. It is just not a good solution.

I'm curious, how does IRC handle history and multi-device sync?

How does IRC handle end-to-end encryption in groups?

How does IRC handle editing messages?

> I'm curious, how does IRC handle history

Servers can re-send history when a client join. At least InspIRCd supports this (though it's not enabled by default.)

I asked users for a desired feature list, and none of those were mentioned.

That's kind of like saying nobody mentioned they wanted wheels for their car, so you got them cars without wheels. What's the problem?

Quassel.

Blowfish normally.

Press up arrow, retype message, or type *correction.

Personally I dont need that stuff. Encryption maybe, but if we can run inside our VPN we should be good.

I'm actually in the process of doing this right now. (Looking for a Slack replacement.)

Which specific daemon did you settle on?

I was about to ask the same. One of the things I badly needed was persistent logs. I googled around and found https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc which lists bouncers that serves the purpose.

Not really looking for replacement though (team is currently on Mattermost)

inspircd with a cron job to mail the logs daily to a pastebin for people who wanted to reference them later.