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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
I started an mIRC script site back in 1997. Young developers would email their scripts to me and I would write a very critical review of them. I did this for many months and the site quickly became one of the top IRC sites online. This momentum has carried the site all the way to 2013. While mIRC script traffic has steadily declined over the years there is still a strong community. We still have members posting mIRC snippets to this day. While I've been working hard to transition the site to more modern development platforms the mIRC posts keep coming. In fact I get a little embarrassed by all the mIRC content on the site. One thing I've noticed is that IRC is and always has been popular among very young developers. Many mIRC scripters are in their teens and some grow up to be professional developers. I've been watching them for 16 years and some come back and reminisce about their old IRC scripting days. IRC has been a major part of my life and has in many ways formed my entire development career.
Hey dude! You reviewed an mIRC script I wrote around 1997. It was called DynDNS and it was for updating your IP address with dyn.ml.org, that old service that would give dial up users with changing IP addresses a static DNS CNAME.
You liked it and gave it a positive review, and at 15, that was really huge for me and kept me hungry to keep coding.
That's a deprecated page. It says 2003 because I rewrote the site in PHP that year and had no dates associated with the scripts prior to that. The download link doesn't work anymore, but I probably still have the file on the server if you want it.
Your site is barely recognizable now, but thanks to the Wayback machine I remember it now. You're definitely on to something with regards to young developers. I started with IRC when I was about 12, and I still remember how magical it felt. In real life I was just a kid, but on IRC and Usenet I could discuss MTG deckbuilding strategy or C++ programming with adults and they wouldn't know how young I was.
And I think that's the draw...when you're young, bright, and ostracized by your peers for wanting to discuss "serious" topics like professional gaming strategy or programming, IRC is a panacea. You can chat with people who don't care about your age and will take you seriously as long as you're capable of intelligent discourse on the topics that interest you.
As I've grown older and formed a network of my peers, I've gradually stopped using IRC, but it will always hold a dear place in my heart because it gave me an outlet for my creativity and passion at a time in my childhood when there were no such outlets in the "real world".
Yes, and you've got such a captive audience with something like mIRC. Back in those days you could write a decent script and instantly get users. Today you've really got to do something special to stand out in the development community.
I first got into serious software development by way if writing Ircle scripts, which eventually led me into writing my own IRC client (AthenaIRC anyone?), so I concur with your assessment.
I'm maybe an exception since I am and have "always" been heavily involved in IRC, but IRC is still a central part of my life. My irssi session is connected to around 120 channels on 16-or-so networks right now.
I've met my fianceé on IRC, got friends for life from all over the world through IRC, got jobs and assignments through IRC and I almost daily solve complex problems with the help of my community and network of friends and contacts through IRC! I've yet to find a tool that comes even remotely close to being as useful for me as IRC.
On QuakeNet we're regularly inviting companies to have developer chats, beta-key giveaways, and we have partnership with events like Dreamhack, for example.
On DALnet we've modernized our webchat (go to http://www.dal.net and give it a shot if you don't have an IRC client installed) using qwebirc (originally written for QuakeNet; but a lot of networks have chosen to use it) and also cooperated with mibbit.com and kiwiirc.com for allowing access.
At work I also run a smaller network with around 50 colleagues more or less actively chatting and using it on a daily basis. Digital office landscape working very well for people both at the office, at home or spread out over other cities.
A lot of applications, websites and services would benefit a lot by not having to reinvent the logic of messaging again by simply writing a frontend to an IRC server and have so so so much for free. Either on their own with an IRC server, or by setting it up towards one of our existing networks. If someone is interested to discuss such ideas, please just ask here or privately!
How do you keep up with 120 channels? Doesn't stuff just scroll by? Do you keep logs or is the chat traffic paginated? Or do you just read what's on your screen when you switch to a certain channel? Or what IS your system for keeping up with so many channels?
I have a dedicated message window on part of my screen where all private messages aswell as notifications matching my defined hilights end up.
Other than that irssi has a pretty good activity tracker; and combined with a script to allow me to filter out things/channels that I don't want to trigger activity (joins, parts for example, and certain channels I just don't care as much about). On top of this I just have a hotkey bound to "/window goto active" that basically takes you to the windows with the highest activity and the lowest identifier. These ones combined does most of the trick.
But its obvious I can't read and keep active track of 120 channels, often I just briefly glance through things, if someone has lots of activity and/or mentions of me I appear and can keep track. Except that its just manual choice of what channel I want to use at the moment. :)
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)
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.
This story reminds me of a funny story of how I came to learn Unix and found my future career.
In Fall 1993, I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and I was sitting in a computer lab, working on a CS assignment. There was an upperclassman guy sitting next to me, chatting on IRC. I'd never seen this before but I was intrigued. I was an avid BBSer and FidoNET sysop (LOL) and the idea of pan-Internet chat was fascinating. I asked him how I could use this program and he showed me how to launch the client on our school's VAX system. I was hooked and began to spend my weekday nights at the lab, chatting on IRC.
A month or so later, I got a call from my father and he was pissed. He had gotten a bill from the school for $800 of "computer time". As it turns out, the school gave every student a small amount of CPU time on the CTRVAX system to register for classes and send e-mail. I was a VMS rookie and I wasn't aware that I had to exit the IRC program when I was finished. I'd just been closing the telnet session and that left IRC running, eating up CPU time. It was like a cell phone data plan: you had your quota and everything over that was very expensive. After I got the call from my dad, I went to the people who ran the VAX and begged them for mercy on this bill. They were merciful but suggested that I find another system to IRC from. They suggested the Sun Microsystems desktops in the CS lab. The Suns were great because there was always a wait to get an open PC in this busy lab but the Suns were unpopular and always available. I'd never used SunOS before but some guy in the lab helped me get started with it.
These SPARCstations were very bare-bones. They had the Sun C compiler and of course OpenView but that's about it. I didn't know anything about compiling OSS back in 93 so I used a popular method to get a client installed. There was a server, sci.dixie.edu, that you would telnet to:
% telnet sci.dixie.edu 1 | sh
Yeah, I actually piped the output of a telnet session to sh(1). Unthinkable nowadays but this is how most of us got started. A few minutes of compiling later, I was up and running with a SunOS IRC client. Over time, I learned more about the Sun workstations and eventually because a Sun sysadmin.
I was a steady IRCer (terrapen on EFnet) until around 2003 or so, when the juvenile politics and fighting got to be too much.
Everything I know about computers and software is largely due to IRC. This is where I started to love hacking. So many great memories.. mIRC (A popular IRC client on windows) really got me started on programming. I learned "ifs", "for", "functions", "widget dialogs", "@window animations (and a base for game creation!)", "sockets".
I remember once I had built a IRC-server running in my mIRC, with all the robots (registering or protecting a channel) also from my mIRC. And then, on top of that, I had made a custom IRC-client with custom @windows.. We were averaging three users on my server, but oh my, that was cool at that time.
I even remember (I was very young at that time) that internet got shut down.. but I was still connected to my server. And I thought I had found a bug in Internet ;-) Obviously, I was just connected to localhost.. but the "What!!" moment was very funny.
This nickname indeed rings a bell. I remember going mostly on mircscripts.org and scriptsdb.org toward the end of my time on irc. I spent most of my time on a french server and on undernet.
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]
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. ;)
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.
I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us.
IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.
Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).
Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.
Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.
[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.
1-4) Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line).
5) Use PGP/GPG and email if you don't trust your IRC server. If you do, just use SSL. Since this is presumably an internal server, why wouldn't you trust it? There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
I don't know any Mac specific clients, not sure why you would want one.
> Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line).
Which doesn't resolve issue 1 (since the server is not available outside of 127.0.0.1 on the ssh host), or issue 3 since it can't see what happened when I was offline (though the bouncer idea is a good one, if fundamentally flawed in that it requires its own full time connection to the IRC server). My computer travels with me, and can not maintain a full time connection to the internet.
> There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
Why? Not everyone in the company needs access to client data. Why would I not want encryption options? The marketing folks don't need to know the internal hostnames of a client. The sales folks don't need a copy of customer chats while troubleshooting an issue.
> not sure why you would want one
Seems like a trip into OS holy war territory that I have no desire to get into.
You can only access this IRC server from the machine it is running on... but anyone in the company has highly priveleged access to it? But you can't run a client on the machine itself? And why would you be running a BNC locally? Who the hell set this system up, and do they run your mail system like this too?
There are so many PEBKACs here they are hard to count.
Regarding your addendum, I too have joined a channel to find everyone idling. Turns out, they get an alert when someone writes something, and all you have to do is ask your question. Almost invariably someone will pipe up.
They'll pipe up if the question is something like "What's the flag to make ls display in color?". IRCers are generally pretty quiet if you ask something actually technical or involving the code, or they'll just offer up a lot of speculation and irrelevant links. My theory is that the real project leaders and developers use mailing lists because they need to get work done, not watch IRC.
Definitely true. It can be really great if the main developers are actually using the IRC channel to coordinate development, but I think that can only really work when there aren't a ton of users to be poking in all the time. Kind of a Catch-22 problem; Linus would not be well-served to hang out on a Linux channel, because (as anyone who has seen his Google+ posts can testify) an army of sycophants would feel the need to interject their own non-content responses to everything he says. A small project, however, can still coordinate among developers while helping the odd user who shows up.
That's exactly what I did (I was aware enough of IRC ettiquite that people idle in the rooms but may come back sometime later & answer): ask a question and usually answer my own question and quit without a response some 4 hours later.
Which is better depends entirely on what the question is. Most questions asked on IRC have absolutely no business on a mailing list, and the ensuing discussions would render the mailing list unusable.
Nobody advocates abandoning email for IRC. Right tool for the job, like anything else in life.
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.
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.
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 am 18 now and have been irc daily for the last two years (mostly open-source dev) i knew about it for a long time but back then was a windows user so couldnt find a good client+ didnt understand the commands. Now i have completely shifted to Linux and cant imagine open source development without irc.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I use IRC every day, its basically one of the most useful communication mediums for me. IRC will never die, but people will always try to change it and fail; Its best as a simple communications medium.
One of the weirdest hold outs of IRC I know about is the collegiate academic competition (or quizbowl) community. Serious quizbowlers across the country still hang out in #quizbowl on Freenode every day, shooting the shit, discussing a novel or philosophical treatise, discussing tournament shortcomings, or just playing a round of the game, shoehorned into the IRC ecosystem. There's a great moment when you think that you buzzed in first, but really a netsplit is about to occur, and the moderator never even noticed you trying!
I'm also a big fan of IRC; I've probably been on EFnet since ~1993 and met a lot of great people there.
The weird thing for me was seeing how extensively the military uses IRC (for tactical communications relay -- various headquarters use it to relay information about operations, and they run structured channels for different levels of the organization). Sadly, mainly with mIRC as a client.
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.
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.
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".
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'...
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...