All of the replies to your comment seem to be pointing out that IRC can be logged, but they're missing the point. You shouldn't play catch-up on IRC. Any useful information to persist should flow into the docs or onto the mailing list. On IRC, no one is expected to stay abreast of discussions they were absent for.

Long-term documentation is not the reason logs are useful. Asynchronous communication is the reason logs are useful.

That is, you can ping people who are offline, or with a flaky network connection (e.g. mobile, where you can't keep a consistent TCP stream open), and they can still see your message and a bit of context when they get back.

Long term documentation should be not be in any emails or IRC logs. It should be properly documented as a formal documentation. But that is different to coordinating a team.

Open source projects typically cannot afford to pay for slack, which makes all but the most recent logs unsearchable. I've found this in quite a few open source groups and it means the same questions get asked over and over again and its incredibly wasteful and irritating IMHO.

These open source groups could surely use a chatbot to log the chats to some place for archival and make the archive searchable, can't they?

By the way, I find IRC/Slack good for real-time support. By nature of being real-time support, some questions get repeated over and over again. The repeition is typically mitigated by adding trivia bots to the channel that can provide answers to frequently asked questions.

The best solution I have seen for archived solutions and to avoid repetition are Stack Overflow (encourage users to post questions on SO with relevant tag) and mailing list with a mailing list archive.

Are there any Slack chatbots that do that kind of logging and archiving? When I searched a couple years ago, I found several projects... and none of them worked except one (SlackArchive.io, I think), which worked for another couple months after I found it then died with, IIRC, communication from its operators that suggested Slack was cracking down on bots that were being used for this purpose. (Which is not unexpected.)

As jononor already said they are usually logged to a public location. And even if they are not they are logged in plain text on each client usually.

In Slack the logs are also not searchable if you above a certain threshold (10k lines or something) if you don’t pay. Slack is prohibitively expensive if you have a lot of users and not really made for such a non-company use case.

> isn’t communication less hidden if anything?

Not everyone uses IRC (but it has archives). Email (and its archives) are a thing, too.

Given you can read all the development of the Linux kernel since almost the beginning (and they don't use chat IIRC), I don't think you are correct.

> There’s a reason large open source projects moved to these (React, Rust, etc).

No, there is no reason. They are newer projects with younger people and they just picked something more modern, based on a web browser.

If there was truly a reason, the kernel and other projects would have moved, too.

You can argue, of course, the pros and cons of each alternative.

No Rust did actually move (its 'official') channel off IRC.

I believe it was sort of catalysed by Mozilla shutting down its IRC servers, but presumably it was already an issue being discussed, and that was just the final nail.

And since that happened, I've stopped engaging with the community at large. There are people who disagree, but I personally do not want to waste stupid amounts of memory to do ephemeral messaging. And their gatekeeping bot is stupid.

Slack and Discord may have logs but you have to download a massive blob of proprietary software, register and agree to some ToS to access them. Those logs are everything but public.