Are old IRC chats discoverable over Google? I don't see any in my results. This was a stated aim of the forum

With IRC it is/was common that people run loggers and publish them. In the past IRC conversations, especially in tech/support channels, were easily found. Today you don't find many on Google, but that problem was already solved way better than it is today.

It's usually done by publishing IRC logs on a webpage.

Examples: - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html - http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html

How discoverable it is on Google depends only on Google and on how those logs are stored.

Not true; it’s usually simply not done at all.

Forum threads inherently have better searchability, because conversations are split into separate pages, with a clear subject/title, and usually a description of what the thread is about at the beginning of the page.

In theory IRC logs could be organized appropriately. But that would require some kind of curation, either manual or via AI, that doesn't really happen in practice, even when irc logs are published.

It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that.

Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix).

It’s also not searchable on Google either (yes you can run a bot but you could do that on discord/matrix or any other service too).

Its just running a quassel Docker container somewhere

Nobody is just setting up a 24/7 server with docker to talk to tech support

Normal people don't even know what Docker is

It's not that bad either. You can use Ergo as an IRC server, and The Lounge as a client to provide a pleasant experience for small teams without the setup hassle.

> people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online

As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there.

Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that goes away as soon as you open the tab. No need to scroll up to where you got mentioned if you don't want to.

The ephemeral nature of IRC makes it a surprisingly relaxed experience.

IRC simply a different use case than a forum. I think both are useful and I don’t see a reason why a company couldn’t have IRC and a forum, there’s no contradiction and the overlap is small.

Forum are very useful for example for use cases where the topic is extremely specific and you throw out a post “who else does this and have this issue?” and hope someone will find your post through internet search and the more people find the thread the higher the likeliness to find a solution.

IRC is nice for quick back-and-forth type conversation for topics which are more “common”, where the requirements to participate in teh conversation are lower. For example, a discussion on a potential feature request.

Oh no IRC and a forum are near perfect complements. Discord and friends try to integrate the two functionalities, but I've yet to see that work even remotely well.

> IRC simply a different use case than a forum.

Except that newer products like Slack and email providers with their conversation view are conflating the two use cases.

Slack tries to implement features of a forum by allowing threaded conversations. Conversation view email removes the nested threads and makes the email thread look more like a chat as opposed to a forum discussion with multiple threads.

> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

Or a usenet newsgroup.