
Ask HN: What's the future of IRC? and how can we make IRC better? - AAsimov
IRC has its days counted? or it will never die?
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lastofus
The biggest missing feature, the feature that has allowed Slack to supplant
IRC to some extent, is offline support.

Every time I close my laptop, I lose all messages sent to the channels I care
about until I pop the lid back open.

I know I can set up an IRC bouncer on a hosted server which can potentially
log messages while my devices are offline, but this requires more time and
effort than most people care for.

~~~
alexmingoia
If you want persistence across devices then you need the cloud. If you don't
want to run a bouncer yourself use irccloud or similar services

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jacquesm
IRC is doing just fine. It will probably outlast HTTP.

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winteriscoming
I have used IRC in some open source projects for a good number of years.
Before that I hadn't heard anyone (within the set of developers I worked with)
even talk about it. To me, it seems like it's one of those things which is too
nerdy that most developers haven't even tried it in their day to day
communication. Till date, I haven't seen any of the companies I have worked or
known about, use IRC as their internal or support communication tool.

Just to be clear, I don't hate IRC - to me it's just another "chat" tool and
it serves its purpose most of the times. One of the things that I would have
liked in it, is in-built support for some kind of formatting for lengthy texts
like logs etc... We used to use (and still do), external text hosting sites
like pastebin, gist etc to share such logs/code snippets, which I never liked.

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gdamjan1
message ids, so that your irc bouncer can replay missing messages (after a
reconnect) when the client requests them.

afaik there's already a proposal to add those
[http://ircv3.net/irc/3.2.html](http://ircv3.net/irc/3.2.html)

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znpy
Imho we should all agree on what services (NickServ, ChanServ, MemoServ, etc)
a next generation IRC server should offer, and what their syntaxes should be.

All the other stuff is pretty much fine.

Maybe we could try and define some networking trick in order to have mobile
clients work better?

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msl09
The two things that I can think of is p2p encryption, but such things could be
hard to include in such an old protocol and it could raise some compability
issues with old clients and libraries.

~~~
znpy
P2P encryption is already available using OTR. Check out the OTR plugin for
xchat/hexchat (or was it pidgin?)

~~~
mwest
The problem with OTR is the lack of support for group chats. There have been
multiple proposals (mpOTR, SCIMP, OMEMO, etc.) but nothing's caught on yet.

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waterphone
It's just fine like it is.

