I also use a lot of IRC. But it just seems that most of the networks are already rather quiet. Though Freenode, galaxynet and some others, I believe, are still growing?
Well, it _does_. The second part is implied to refer to a different incarnation of it. Eg the original use "Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!" ("The king is dead, long live the king") refers to the previous king dying and a new one ascending the throne.
As such, I believe the second part of the title refers to an adapting ("new") form of IRC. As mentioned in the article, projects to add video chat support and the likes. The old IRC is dead (well, dying at least by the looks of it), a new adapted version is the future. [According to the article]
I'm permanently logged in to over a dozen channels. They're all related to some open-source project or other.
In my experience, IRC today is a godsend if you want to talk to techie types, and largely pointless for anything else.
So it'd be no surprise to me if most of the people reading HN use IRC all the time, whilst the majority of the rest of the world considers it dead (if it's heard of it at all)
I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here.
The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.
Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, since, you know, these are tech startups...
One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?”
Andreessen: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” And I said, “What do you mean, what did Netscape do?” And he was like, “Dude, I was in junior high. I wasn’t paying attention.
I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of it anyway).
I know not everybody is a nostalgic nerd with a thing for tech industry history, but, yeah, I'm two years younger and even I was aware of the general history of Netscape's journey and choices by the time I was 14-15.
Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)
No. I have no numbers, but I'd say we're looking at 80-90% of all websites written in dorm rooms in 2003 were written in PHP. Most of the rest in classic ASP (which was barely 'classic' yet in 2003).
For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.
I thought about this a little more.. I think the reason I find it so hard to believe is because of the MS antitrust trial. It was a huge thing at the time and Netscape was a big part of it... so unless you were completely oblivious to computers and the internet, it would be hard to not know about Netscape.
Strictly speaking, however, there is a difference between knowing about Netscape and knowing what they were doing. Myself, I used Netscape software daily between 1996 and 2000 something but can't say I really knew what the company was doing. Sure, I know all about that they released a web browser for free, but I have no real idea (without looking it up on Wikipedia) what they really did for their shareholders.
So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.
not that hard to believe. I am 20 now, and I didn't even know much about iPhone when it launched. All I thought about it was that its just another super expensive phone, like one of Nokia's luxury phone. Coz I wasn't interested to these things at the time, and well, I wasn't paying attention.
A more apt comparison would be if you didn't know about the iPhone now. This conversation between Zuckerberg and Andreessen didn't happen right when Netscape came out.
I came on the scene around the time IM and web-based chat rooms (arguably) peaked; 2000. In the 'FOSS' world, aside from mailing lists, IRC was the dominant means of communication.
I'm only turning 27 this year, and I really can't wrap my head around people using things like vendor-specific IM or web-based chat rooms as a replacement for IRC in similar scenarios.
I know it's basically the same thing; a centralised gathering point tied to a server run by a particular company or organisation, but, I don't know...IRC just feels like a more 'transparent', neutral form/protocol to me.
The people who go "into tech" during college because they saw Mark Zuckerberg making dumptrucks full of money probably don't know what IRC is, but the people who had to get into IRC chats to figure out how to make linux work on our hardware (like me, and most of my peers) absolutely grew up with IRC.
I grew up having friends that I met solely on IRC, and having it be a staple of the way that I communicated with certain groups of people; it's the same story with most of the people I hang out with.
Yeah, I realized the other day that in a year or two I'll have been using IRC for half my life. Not adult life mind, my whole life. That would be impressive ...were I old.
My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, sharing articles from online, discussing technologies in an open forum, discussing infrastructure changes or proposing changes. etc. We recently have actually configured various systems like IDS, syslog, etc. to also dump to dedicated channels and use it as a throw away log dumping medium. Want to keep an eye on the db logs? #dblogs want to see how the live web cluster is doing #weblogs want to see IDS reports in real time #idslogs.
What started as a joke has actually become a staple of company wide team communication and systems monitoring... plus I get to slap coworkers with trouts.
A long time ago, at work, I wrote a mIRC plugin to display incoming messages from a bot on a separate stay-on-top window. IRC has indeed a lot of business applications.
At another small startup, I setup an IRC server when I was told they were using Bonjour before I got there. It started out very similarly for us -- just a place to chat with the other developers and ops people and share some links. Over time, several IRC bots were created doing real work for the company; most importantly while I was there, the deploy robot would cut a release from revision control for the particular project being deployed and deploy where it was told (or even revert to a previous release if necessary), only listening to people based on their umasks (everyone had their own hostnames with properly setup RDNS too, but that was another matter)... Worked quite well! Can't say if it still does, or not, as I am no longer there.
I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message.
Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.
I don't agree that email is heavy at all. I see nothing here that couldn't be accomplished with email and/or a wiki. Sharing links over irc makes little sense, links belong on a wiki so they can be searched for and edited etc etc.
But that's the appeal of IRC, the protocol is simple and it's easy to write tools that plugin and work with the stream.
In the case of links, a little bit of Python and the phenny framework let me write a bot that scraped links and post them to a private Twitter feed. That's a lot more flexible than a wiki for my purposes.
You would be hard pressed to find anybody using IRC who doesn't also use email and wikis. Once you add IRC to your toolbelt, those things, as if by magic, stop appearing to be the best tool for every job. Actually, it works that way with most tools I find.
Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.
The web client is a bit "special" though - after a day or two of running it with 4+ channels open the history will build up and jquery functions will start freezing the interaction. Flash/AIR client is much better, but... it's Flash/AIR (copy/paste issues, different set of fonts, message notifications not clear).
The best way to access hipchat that I've seen so far was just a jabber client - xmpp seems to be the backend of their service.
On the mac, at least, I've found the AIR client is really, really good. I haven't really run into any of the issues you mentioned and have been using it daily for several months.
And my coworkers really love the web client. And some use xmpp. Many of us regularly use the iOS app. I guess that's one of the strength's of hipchat, the variety of access methods that all feel basically first-class. (and one person on our team even uses the SMS integration.)
We use Hipchat at work at the moment and while I like it overall there are some issues that they need to address.
The Air app for desktop can sometimes have performance issues for no particular reason. They're about to release a native OS X app though so that should solve this for a large amount of users.
The android application in woeful. It consistently logs me out and forgets my password which means that it's totally unusable for out of office notifications from people. I've had to rely more on their email notifications for unread personal messages than their Android app. It's a real shame because I could see myself getting a lot more use out of Hipchat if it worked well enough.
Eh, that's pretty much what BNCs or tmux/screen is for. The number of hours that I haven't been connected to IRC in the past 10 years is probably low-double digits. (I'm on several networks so a network outage won't knock me off IRC entirely.)
Plus with IRC you have the assurance that it will never go away. Worse case scenario is you just write your own server and do it yourself. There is no RFC for skype though.
We use a IRC bouncer for this; It works really well to preserve history, and let me get messages when I'm offline.
when I disconnect, it automatically sets me /away, and renames my nick to e1ven_zz to make it clear to the rest of the team I'm away.. When I log back in, it renames me back to e1ven, and streams everything I missed.
I don't know about know, but I remember being told as recently as a couple of years ago that id Software used it as an inter-office chat tool. I certainly have imagined its use at jobs before, even when I worked in call centers. It couldn't be hard to let the rank and file chat when not on a call. (Yes, they were oddly draconian about doing nothing, or reading a book, between calls. Forget your book and your day is ruined.)
Around 2000 when I got out of school I was working as a programmer for a company that made J2ME mobile games.
They were sitting in the Netherlands and had hired a bunch of teleworkers. Mostly from Germany and Poland.
And whenever there were meetings (even with the bosses) we used IRC for that. It was pretty cool. You were also allowed to go AFK but you had to leave your client open to read the backlogs. (People knew beforehand if their active presence was required in the meeting.)
Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used.
I agree with you. I recently worked with a lovely tech agency who used IRC for a lot of communication amongst their office and remote-based workers. Typically, each project had its own chat room, and we'd create private chat rooms as required if only a couple of us needed to discuss something.
I was really surprised with how well the system worked - and how easy it was to use! It'd probably been a decade or more since I'd used IRC, and it was a really pleasant rediscovery.
NAT traversal barely scratches the surface. The Zephyr protocol is a crime against nature and nature's god. :-P
(I do like the class/instance structure, though, and that's never been duplicated anywhere else as far as I know. A friend and I made a plugin for irssi that allows you to use instances on IRC, but it never caught on.)
Even tho I still use IRC at home we use hipchat at work, and it works pretty well. The ability to easily send screengrabs and similar stuff to other users is pretty handy.
Unfortunately Hipchat won't work for my day job because the higher ups have this thing against hosted services (and given the security climate nowadays I can't entirely blame them).
Any idea of something like Hipchat but hostable internally?
Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a
proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a
time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily
host and extend yourself?
I've just started writing it off as "Because startup!". There really are just some protocols that don't need to be reinvented as companies. Yeah, twitter is better than finger, but IRC has proven itself.
I mean, I can give you the reasons that I have a hipchat account which I use with my coworkers, even though a good 50% of us are also on IRC for other purposes.
1) It proved to be a pain supporting the non-techies using IRC
2) Nobody wanted to maintain the IRC server and set up logging. (And, if you add up the couple hours to do so and maintain it in a year, hipchat ends up being a good deal)
3) Some of our people use the SMS and xmpp integration, which makes it easily fit into their existing communications.
4) The API, web based search, gui admin, github integration, unfuddle integration, etc are already setup and/or written (an extension of #2)
5) Nice handling of large chunks of pasted text. (The web and desktop clients format them in fixed width properly and limit the size but provide and expand link.) This is more convenient than pasting a pastebin link, and works better than irc because of line breaks.
I mean, basic economics as well. If someone spends an hour a year maintaining the IRC server, helping non-tech people get onto IRC, etc, then paying for hipchat instead, for 4-8 people is well worth it each year.
(This is all after having used a channel on a public irc server, then someone set up IRC on a vps, then we used grove , and ended up on hipchat for the past year.)
Yeah. We use google apps, dropbox, unfuddle, GitHub, hipchat, Linode and amazon. Basically, we're pretty comfortable trusting our business with these companies. We're not in a space where we have secrets that really would give someone a competitive advantage. A few things like security credentials are shared offline or in a truecrypt volume.
I mean. If that's truly a concern, it seems like you need to own and configure your own physical hardware and require VPN access to all of them. For us/me, the cost and inconvenience isn't worth it, considering the basically valueless data to an outsider.
That's not to say that everyone decision matrix is the same or should be... As you mention.
I assume you also don't get people who use proprietary, hosted services to host (Github) and run (Heroku) their code, manage their projects (Jira), email (Sendgrid), forums (vBulletin), helpdesk (Zendesk) and a whole lot more.
We ditched jabber for IRC at another company I previously worked at, and it became a staple for communication even though our entire office was only ~800 square feet.
If you have IM clients with easy to use group chat features I think IRC might not be the best choice for professional use.
Keeping it within the IM clients allows to have a single place to log discussions and you know everyone is using roughly the same features.
Actually making it an explicit task to invite the right people to discuss when you need a group chat can be a feature in itself.
It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time.
Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.
He, for me it's the other way: I like IRC because it's very simplistic. But when I have to do something with XMPP on the protocol level I just want to stab my eyes out because it's a bloated pile of XML.
Maybe it depends on tooling. If you have a language that is married with XML - like Java - you probably will have no problems with XMPP. But if you're doing stuff with C you will love the simple structure of IRC.
IRC is extremely idiosyncratic, though. XMPP is much more logical and consistent. Any decent language can deal with trees, although XML is sometimes a little annoying.
The potential problem with XML is the overhead. I'm not sure that's been an issue so far, though.
I doubt that's it. More likely Wave died because they somehow neglected to actually release it. By the time they closed it down, very few people had gotten invites.
XML is a gleaming beacon of purity and grace compared to the CTCP spec[1]. Something that should be relatively simple: "allow very basic RPC using inband signals." The mess of incoherent and mutually contradictory statements about how quoting these messages should happen makes it likely that anyone writing a bot either uses an existing library or still wakes up occasionally in teh middle of the night in a cold sweat.
Yeah, the simplicity is a godsend. Lets you pump out a minimally viable client/bot in minutes with whatever language you like, without having to mess around with an existing framework or library.
I'll second that. For example, here's a bot that logs every channel you invite it to...in 50 lines of shell. How big would the equivalent XMPP bot be (libraries included)?
50 lines of clean comprehensible shell code even! Written with the traditional code-golfed style of shell scripting I bet you could half that without even trying. ;)
Having also written a client, I have to disagree that the protocol is simple. The lack of standardized text encoding, the 512 message limit, the desync issue of RPL_NAMREPLY, the hundreds of differences between each network's server behavior, and more make it quite a pain to write a competitive client. It's so bad that the CAP/ACK was protocol was drafted to query the behavior of a server in a standardized way, in addition to RPL_ISUPPORT (which uses the 005 numeric in a way that conflicts with the protocol standard).
That's another problem: all the subprotocols grafted onto IRC, especially CTCP which is such a mess that most clients don't implement it completely. Then there's mIRC colors which has parsing ambiguities. Also, the multiple passive DCC request formats.
It's a complete mess, and there desperately needs to be a standards body of some sort at the very least collecting all this info in one place for client developers.
The idiosyncracies that you have to get into when you want to write a proper client for humans, and what you actually have to worry about if your aim is just writing tools that use IRC (internal deployment bots, or whatnot) are miles apart. The vast majority of users will only be interested in the second.
Just follow the RFCs for the features that you need, and ignore everything else.
Anyway, IRC is plainly simple if you look at it's competition. I can use IRC with netcat without any significant effort; there are not a lot of other things I can say that about.
Well, look at one of my examples: RPL_NAMREPLY, which returns a list of nicknames in the channel, prefixed by channel privilege. One privilege is returned at a time according to the protocol, despite the fact that a user can have multiple privileges at once, such as +vo. If such a user is deopped, your tool won't know that they are +v unless you have taken the steps to gather this state previously (this also means there is a period of time after joining a channel in which you're not in sync with the channel modes the server is seeing).
There are extensions to the protocol to support returning multiple privileges in RPL_NAMREPLY, but now your tool has to support both modes of operation. Additionally, the usual medium for discovering these extensions, RPL_ISUPPORT, slightly differs between networks, and today there are now multiple ways to query a server's capabilities, so you have to support RPL_ISUPPORT, PROTOCTL, CAP, and possibly others I haven't seen, and their features overlap. Also, none of these are officially standardized.
All this adds up to needless hassle when you're trying to implement a full-featured framework or tool. These are problems that should have been officially addressed years ago so that everyone is on the same page.
This is quite interesting. Citing the reasons of the decline of IRC makes it a more attractive prospect if you ask me now. Time to dig out irssi again :)
I was a user of IRC around 1998-2002 (I was a quakenet op) but I got lazy and bored of the politics and switched to MSN messenger which was vastly more popular as well.
IRC was, at least for me, one of the main reasons that I pursued tech and started programming at a young age. A friend of mine introduced me to a local Irish group of Linux enthusiasts/sysadmins/engineers who put up with my foolish questions long enough for me to learn something. While some channels are very quiet now I still find it one of the best resources when I'm troubleshooting a problem.
If it wasn't for one irc channel, I don't think I would have made it through the first 2 years of programming. Didn't bother them to much (i hope), but just to understand pointers and that at the start, with C, and other things, really helped. 12 years on and wouldn't wanna do anything else.
Using it daily since 13 years back (half of my life) as the sole medium for communicating with most of my friends. First we had a channel on a public network but now we are on our own server since 4 years back. MSN had a stint as the way of communicating with my less tech savvy friends, it is now replaced by Skype. IRC feels kind of impossible to replace though.
IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood.
They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, shudder) appeared on the horizon.
So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.
This. My pet peeve of re: Usenet old farts: 'top vs bottom quoting'. I certainly don't long for the days where I had to wade through flame wars over stupid crap like that.
If there was some way to add ads to Usenet and IRC, we (well, 'they') wouldn't have had to re-invent it all poorly in the form of phpBB and its thousands similar packages, and various 'chat' or 'private messaging' apps and websites. What life could have been, if there was one good dedicated client that could handle all user messaging 'sites'...
Yes there has been some decay since 1998 (unsurprisingly), but in the past years it's been nowhere near as dramatic as it may seem at a glance - the charts are just difficult to compare due to the jumping scales and colors.
Freenode, for example, keeps growing steadily since 2007, many of the smaller networks show pretty much a flatline or cross-shift in the same timeframe.
As it stands the networks still serve ~500k daily users; seems a bit early to call it "dead".
I really attribute the existence of IRC to what I've been able to achieve in the past few years. Since starting my own network back in 2006 when I was in sixth grade, I've met numerous users who I've been in communication with for years, learned how to setup and manage a Unix server, how to deal with the occasional trolls and denial of service attacks. It even lead to me learning how to code, as I hung out with quite a few devs. In fact, my first online business was a result of some brainstorming on IRC.
Fortunately, for me, most of my friends that I met through IRC are my age (+/- a year or two), which I always found to be pretty neat. The conversation is always active for the most part, and most of the guys are in the US and UK, so it's usually active all day. Over the years, we merged/linked with other networks, welcomed new people, hosted channels for various open-source projects, but just as the article states, usage has definitely declined. I can recall back in 2009-2010 when we had servers in three continents to reduce potential lag when things were really going well. Now, the IRCd hub and services run comfortably on a Linode 512 without links.
Part of the reason I think we're still alive and well is because of the admins (NetAdmins, IRCops, etc). You'll notice that on most networks, admins are arrogant and very strict when it comes to messages per second, or banned words/topics. As long as nothing illegal was being discussed nor transmitted, we don't do anything. In all honestly, I can't recall the last time I used any commands to ban, Gline, Kline, and so on. This is what contributes to a network's longevity.
It's comforting that IRCd(s) are still being actively developed, but I would really love to see its popularity pick back up again. It's really an amazing tool for communication, whether it's used for collaborating with coworkers, discussing open source projects, or even for a casual chat.
If you find yourself looking to connect and need a client, you might want to download Textual (for OS X only, available through the Mac App Store or Github).
I've been using Inspircd (http://inspircd.github.com) for quite a while, so I'd recommend checking that project out. As far as authentication goes, there's the Atheme (http://www.atheme.net) project that integrates nicely with Inspircd. If you haven't used it or heard of it, it allows you to register channels/rooms, establish a hierarchy of operators and admins, and give users the ability to login and secure their username.
Neither are the friendliest in terms of setting up and configuring, but it's really not too bad. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message on IRC (irc.flux.cd #flux) or Twitter (@Lyetz) and I could help you out.
Or do yourself a favor and don't. For casual group chat IRC blows xmpp out of the water. Every experience I've had with xmpp group chat has been subpar and frustrating.
Sure, but if it's company-linked, then you can use it for event alerts, automated contact list sharing when employees come and go, and other interesting features. The popular clients easily integrate with single sign-on type stuff on most platforms. You can point non-technical users at it and they understand. IRC is not like that.
At my previous job we setup a internal company IRC server using InspIRCd [0]. We decided to host it on EC2 as well, and restricted access to it by putting the instance in our VPC [1] (only reachable over VPN).
It became pretty popular and it was a great way to communicate between branch offices.
InspIRCd is an Ok-ish IRCd to set up, however much more complex than the alternatives and had its share of problems in the past (security-wise as well as programming-wise(memleaks etc.))
Event though UnrealIRCd doesn't have the best reputation, it is still a quite easy-to-set-up IRCd and is still in more-or-less active development...
Depending if you'll only use this internally or not you might want to set up Services to provide some facility to register nicknames and make sure of the identity of participants in the chat - take a look at either Anope or Atheme for that.
Another IRCd to keep an eye on is ngIRCd [1], which claims to be small and lightweight - however i haven't had a chance to try it out yet...
Is there some particular reason you aren't comfortable using one of the public networks? I've worked at several companies that had private channels on Freenode.
I stopped using irc about 4 years ago, and came back to it a year ago. It's like an old, faithful, trusty friend. That said, it does seem like a lot of people have abandoned it for pastures new, but everything old and boring becomes new and exciting again at some stage so who knows, we might see an resurgence.
I love IRC. I picked it back up after around 9 years of absence and couldn't be happier. If you're interested, you should join freenode #startups, #ventures, #sfhn.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadInteresting that IRC actually predates the web. I find it very useful at times.
IRC and Email is the only sane ways to communicate online at the moment. (In my opinion)
As such, I believe the second part of the title refers to an adapting ("new") form of IRC. As mentioned in the article, projects to add video chat support and the likes. The old IRC is dead (well, dying at least by the looks of it), a new adapted version is the future. [According to the article]
In my experience, IRC today is a godsend if you want to talk to techie types, and largely pointless for anything else.
So it'd be no surprise to me if most of the people reading HN use IRC all the time, whilst the majority of the rest of the world considers it dead (if it's heard of it at all)
The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.
Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, since, you know, these are tech startups...
One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?”
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1
I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of it anyway).
Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)
For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.
He's asking what netscape the group, as in the people building the software did, not what the software did.
I'm only turning 27 this year, and I really can't wrap my head around people using things like vendor-specific IM or web-based chat rooms as a replacement for IRC in similar scenarios.
I know it's basically the same thing; a centralised gathering point tied to a server run by a particular company or organisation, but, I don't know...IRC just feels like a more 'transparent', neutral form/protocol to me.
The people who go "into tech" during college because they saw Mark Zuckerberg making dumptrucks full of money probably don't know what IRC is, but the people who had to get into IRC chats to figure out how to make linux work on our hardware (like me, and most of my peers) absolutely grew up with IRC.
I grew up having friends that I met solely on IRC, and having it be a staple of the way that I communicated with certain groups of people; it's the same story with most of the people I hang out with.
I've taken to using private Skype rooms a lot (which is an underutilized resource and, incidentally, can be monetized for niche markets)
What started as a joke has actually become a staple of company wide team communication and systems monitoring... plus I get to slap coworkers with trouts.
Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.
In the case of links, a little bit of Python and the phenny framework let me write a bot that scraped links and post them to a private Twitter feed. That's a lot more flexible than a wiki for my purposes.
The best way to access hipchat that I've seen so far was just a jabber client - xmpp seems to be the backend of their service.
And my coworkers really love the web client. And some use xmpp. Many of us regularly use the iOS app. I guess that's one of the strength's of hipchat, the variety of access methods that all feel basically first-class. (and one person on our team even uses the SMS integration.)
The Air app for desktop can sometimes have performance issues for no particular reason. They're about to release a native OS X app though so that should solve this for a large amount of users.
The android application in woeful. It consistently logs me out and forgets my password which means that it's totally unusable for out of office notifications from people. I've had to rely more on their email notifications for unread personal messages than their Android app. It's a real shame because I could see myself getting a lot more use out of Hipchat if it worked well enough.
Your shared history vanishes when you're off the network though. Skype has channels, and preserves history, syncing your "rooms" when you log back in.
If it were as easy to pipe machine data (syslog, notices, tweets?) into Skype as it is to pipe it into IRC, it'd be perfect.
Plus with IRC you have the assurance that it will never go away. Worse case scenario is you just write your own server and do it yourself. There is no RFC for skype though.
when I disconnect, it automatically sets me /away, and renames my nick to e1ven_zz to make it clear to the rest of the team I'm away.. When I log back in, it renames me back to e1ven, and streams everything I missed.
They were sitting in the Netherlands and had hired a bunch of teleworkers. Mostly from Germany and Poland.
And whenever there were meetings (even with the bosses) we used IRC for that. It was pretty cool. You were also allowed to go AFK but you had to leave your client open to read the backlogs. (People knew beforehand if their active presence was required in the meeting.)
I agree with you. I recently worked with a lovely tech agency who used IRC for a lot of communication amongst their office and remote-based workers. Typically, each project had its own chat room, and we'd create private chat rooms as required if only a couple of us needed to discuss something.
I was really surprised with how well the system worked - and how easy it was to use! It'd probably been a decade or more since I'd used IRC, and it was a really pleasant rediscovery.
In short: I'll be recommending its use in future.
(I do like the class/instance structure, though, and that's never been duplicated anywhere else as far as I know. A friend and I made a plugin for irssi that allows you to use instances on IRC, but it never caught on.)
Even tho I still use IRC at home we use hipchat at work, and it works pretty well. The ability to easily send screengrabs and similar stuff to other users is pretty handy.
Any idea of something like Hipchat but hostable internally?
This one looks like a carbon copy of hipchat, but I have no experience with it: http://kikuchat.com/
I don't get you people. I really don't get you.
sure if you enjoy proprietary walled gardens with uptime issues
1) It proved to be a pain supporting the non-techies using IRC
2) Nobody wanted to maintain the IRC server and set up logging. (And, if you add up the couple hours to do so and maintain it in a year, hipchat ends up being a good deal)
3) Some of our people use the SMS and xmpp integration, which makes it easily fit into their existing communications.
4) The API, web based search, gui admin, github integration, unfuddle integration, etc are already setup and/or written (an extension of #2)
5) Nice handling of large chunks of pasted text. (The web and desktop clients format them in fixed width properly and limit the size but provide and expand link.) This is more convenient than pasting a pastebin link, and works better than irc because of line breaks.
I mean, basic economics as well. If someone spends an hour a year maintaining the IRC server, helping non-tech people get onto IRC, etc, then paying for hipchat instead, for 4-8 people is well worth it each year.
(This is all after having used a channel on a public irc server, then someone set up IRC on a vps, then we used grove , and ended up on hipchat for the past year.)
For me, that trumps all your points. It seems that for you, it doesn't. The world's a crazy place.
I mean. If that's truly a concern, it seems like you need to own and configure your own physical hardware and require VPN access to all of them. For us/me, the cost and inconvenience isn't worth it, considering the basically valueless data to an outsider.
That's not to say that everyone decision matrix is the same or should be... As you mention.
The only complaint about IRC that I've heard in the past was SSL, however we added SSL to the connection without problems.
I work at Google Dublin, and we consider IRC to be an invaluable business tool. There really isn't a replacement for it.
Actually making it an explicit task to invite the right people to discuss when you need a group chat can be a feature in itself.
Now I love IRC, but for private use only.
> The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.
Not shocked that a bunch of kids whose first experience with a computer was Windows XP and all trying to recreate facebook have never heard of IRC
Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.
Maybe it depends on tooling. If you have a language that is married with XML - like Java - you probably will have no problems with XMPP. But if you're doing stuff with C you will love the simple structure of IRC.
The potential problem with XML is the overhead. I'm not sure that's been an issue so far, though.
[1] http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/rfc/ctcpspec.html
The claimed scope is so broad, though, that it's hard even to figure out a good starting point for further investigation.
https://github.com/acg/logbot/blob/master/bin/logbot.sh
That's another problem: all the subprotocols grafted onto IRC, especially CTCP which is such a mess that most clients don't implement it completely. Then there's mIRC colors which has parsing ambiguities. Also, the multiple passive DCC request formats.
It's a complete mess, and there desperately needs to be a standards body of some sort at the very least collecting all this info in one place for client developers.
The idiosyncracies that you have to get into when you want to write a proper client for humans, and what you actually have to worry about if your aim is just writing tools that use IRC (internal deployment bots, or whatnot) are miles apart. The vast majority of users will only be interested in the second.
Just follow the RFCs for the features that you need, and ignore everything else.
Anyway, IRC is plainly simple if you look at it's competition. I can use IRC with netcat without any significant effort; there are not a lot of other things I can say that about.
There are extensions to the protocol to support returning multiple privileges in RPL_NAMREPLY, but now your tool has to support both modes of operation. Additionally, the usual medium for discovering these extensions, RPL_ISUPPORT, slightly differs between networks, and today there are now multiple ways to query a server's capabilities, so you have to support RPL_ISUPPORT, PROTOCTL, CAP, and possibly others I haven't seen, and their features overlap. Also, none of these are officially standardized.
All this adds up to needless hassle when you're trying to implement a full-featured framework or tool. These are problems that should have been officially addressed years ago so that everyone is on the same page.
I was a user of IRC around 1998-2002 (I was a quakenet op) but I got lazy and bored of the politics and switched to MSN messenger which was vastly more popular as well.
The fundamental simplicity of IRC always rocked.
> "How do I allocate a string?"
> "But what is a string?"
> "You know that thing with letters in it. Seriously how do I allocate a string?"
> "Sorry we don't know what a string is, you'll need to define it for us first"
> "OK it's a contiguous chunk of bytes in RAM"
> "Sorry C has no concept of bytes or RAM."
That kind of impractical nonsense.
At my new startup we're using www.hipchat.com which is a pretty good replacement (simpler, no IRC server to setup), and its cheap.
They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, shudder) appeared on the horizon.
So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.
If there was some way to add ads to Usenet and IRC, we (well, 'they') wouldn't have had to re-invent it all poorly in the form of phpBB and its thousands similar packages, and various 'chat' or 'private messaging' apps and websites. What life could have been, if there was one good dedicated client that could handle all user messaging 'sites'...
http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2012
Freenode, for example, keeps growing steadily since 2007, many of the smaller networks show pretty much a flatline or cross-shift in the same timeframe.
As it stands the networks still serve ~500k daily users; seems a bit early to call it "dead".
Had no clue IRC had died.
Fortunately, for me, most of my friends that I met through IRC are my age (+/- a year or two), which I always found to be pretty neat. The conversation is always active for the most part, and most of the guys are in the US and UK, so it's usually active all day. Over the years, we merged/linked with other networks, welcomed new people, hosted channels for various open-source projects, but just as the article states, usage has definitely declined. I can recall back in 2009-2010 when we had servers in three continents to reduce potential lag when things were really going well. Now, the IRCd hub and services run comfortably on a Linode 512 without links.
Part of the reason I think we're still alive and well is because of the admins (NetAdmins, IRCops, etc). You'll notice that on most networks, admins are arrogant and very strict when it comes to messages per second, or banned words/topics. As long as nothing illegal was being discussed nor transmitted, we don't do anything. In all honestly, I can't recall the last time I used any commands to ban, Gline, Kline, and so on. This is what contributes to a network's longevity.
It's comforting that IRCd(s) are still being actively developed, but I would really love to see its popularity pick back up again. It's really an amazing tool for communication, whether it's used for collaborating with coworkers, discussing open source projects, or even for a casual chat.
If you find yourself looking to connect and need a client, you might want to download Textual (for OS X only, available through the Mac App Store or Github).
Do note that I will be hosting this on EC2, so some semblance of authentication/security would be welcome.
Neither are the friendliest in terms of setting up and configuring, but it's really not too bad. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message on IRC (irc.flux.cd #flux) or Twitter (@Lyetz) and I could help you out.
Popular clients integrate with it? Check.
Single Sign on? Check.
Non-technical user? They sign in, they type, they see what others type. What's not to understand?
The only thing you mentioned that IRC doesn't have is automated contact list sharing.
It became pretty popular and it was a great way to communicate between branch offices.
[0] http://inspircd.github.com
[1] http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/
Event though UnrealIRCd doesn't have the best reputation, it is still a quite easy-to-set-up IRCd and is still in more-or-less active development...
Depending if you'll only use this internally or not you might want to set up Services to provide some facility to register nicknames and make sure of the identity of participants in the chat - take a look at either Anope or Atheme for that.
Another IRCd to keep an eye on is ngIRCd [1], which claims to be small and lightweight - however i haven't had a chance to try it out yet...
[1] http://ngircd.barton.de/index.php.en
Jabbr (http://www.jabbr.net) is a good replacement for IRC, with features such as offline history, and embedded content (for code snippets, etc.)
Care to chat?
Especially when running your own server this would be a more secure alternative.