
Grove.io: Hosted, Searchable IRC Chat For Teams - jzb
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/11/groveio-hosted-searchable-irc.php
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peterwwillis
I know it's brand new and all, but there seems to be a lack of "normal" irc
functionality/usability. Nickserv has no 'help' functionality, nicks
apparently have to be universally unique across all of Grove (better hope
someone doesn't use my name in a different organization?), there's no
chanserv. The help page is concise but should probably be printed in MOTD or
some other way for non-Web clients (I was confused that I had to identify
before joining a channel... it created a 'ghost' channel for me instead of
booting me and telling me to identify, like most irc servers). And when you
add a member to the org, they immediately are joined to the channel - even if
they're not connected to a client? How do you know they're available to
respond to a question?

Also, since it appears to be a new & custom irc server, i'd not really be
willing to trust corporate communication on a platform known for attracting
hackers.

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jrockway
_there seems to be a lack of "normal" irc functionality/usability. Nickserv
has no 'help' functionality, there's no chanserv_

This may shock and surprise you, but I've been using IRC on servers without
NickServ and ChanServ for decades. No services != not IRC.

 _Also, since it appears to be a new & custom irc server, i'd not really be
willing to trust corporate communication on a platform known for attracting
hackers._

Obvious troll.

~~~
peterwwillis
Granted, services are not required. But if you're going to charge for a hosted
IRC server (and you require nickserv to join a channel) you might as well
clean them up and make them slightly user-friendly/functional.

Rewriting an irc daemon from scratch is a bad idea. The multitude of existing
irc daemons and their hybrids are proof that the technology's complex enough
to take years to stabilize, much less secure. If it does actually succeed
they'll run into the growing pains of scaling that (assuming they add standard
irc cluster topology) will bring on netsplits and other potential issues. If I
were a hacker i'd look at a from-scratch not-quite-complete alpha-release IRC
daemon as a fun toy to mess with. And if I owned a company I wouldn't want to
risk my private communications on such shaky ground.

I'm not saying it isn't a cool idea... it just needs a few years to cook
before i'd put my money or business into it (or at least a reputable, secure
codebase)

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un1xl0ser
Nice work, thanks for making pretty things, keep it up.

Disclaimer: I've been brainwashed by working in "enterprise" environments. I
understand that is not necessarily your target audience.

Logging scares me when it is a hosted solution like this. I signed up for the
trial (for personal use) and didn't see that configuration option. Maildrops
are lots of fun, but dumps of your dev IRC chats? Most regulated environments
have retention periods, and after that most communication is considered to be
a liability and storage concern (IANL, TINLA). I would say that dev chats are
useful for about a few months, max.

A non-hosted solution would be nice, but certainly takes a huge amount of
effort to layer on something like that to what you already have.

Is there any open community (i.e. a grove.io instance) to join and chat about
your product, get a feel for it? Sounds like a bit of maintenance headache,
but probably worth it. I can't really demo it well by myself.

Also, I can't imagine talking to my coworkers like I am accustomed to chatting
on IRC <ahem>. That's just a random thought.

Edit: spelling errours

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gooddelta
Just saw a demo of this; it blew me away with a clean UI, and some awesome
features -- the search/ACL implementations are REALLY slick. It also gets rid
of another problem I have, which is that I _hate_ installing/configuring IRC
servers.

Every company I've ever worked for has needed this.

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perlgeek
Not quite as shiny, but I've hosted IRC logs for a few years now. Example:
<http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/today>

If anybody wants a channel on freenode logged publicly, feel free to contact
me.

(The search facility currently sucks, I'm working on a very different search
backend these days).

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bri3d
What's the advantage of an IRC-backed chat vs. a Jabber-backed chat?

Sure, IRC's protocol is simpler, but it's also not designed to support
authentication or security natively, or to be federated in a "cross-network"
way like XMPP is. It seems that XMPP is more modern, more flexible, and
supports real user authentication natively - a win in every respect.

Plus most of the clients people these days use for IRC (Adium, irssi, Pidgin,
XChat) support Jabber anyway.

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piotrSikora
It's not? How about:

* passwords required to connect to the IRC server,

* passwords required to use given nickname (enforced via NickServ),

* SSL.

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bri3d
NickServ and "IRC services" in general are shoehorned extensions to IRC. Most
clients support them in some automated fashion now, but there's no guarantee,
and usage differs depending on "IRC services" package.

At any rate, my original comment came off a bit the wrong way. I'm not trying
to say that IRC isn't a workable solution for this kind of group chat system,
as it clearly is. I just don't see why using IRC over Jabber (which seems more
technically suited to this domain) is a selling point, especially in a
marketplace crowded with group chat solutions.

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leahculver
I think it's actually an issue of perception. When I hear Jabber or XMPP, I
think of one-to-one chat and when I hear IRC I definitely think of group chat.
In general, IRC clients seem more tailored towards groups.

That said, there's definitely room for both protocols and I could see
supporting XMPP as well at some point.

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tilgovi
XMPP MUC is not fun, nor fun to scale. IRC has netsplits, but it does work
reliably for tons of people all day every day.

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mweibel
I don't really think that's true. Look at Jabber.org which is probably the
biggest jabber network out there and it seems they're scaling pretty well.

Edit: Also XMPP supports UTF-8 for everyhting out of the box and as far as I
know it's not really possible with IRC (or did that change over the last
years?). E.g. nicks with non-ascii chars are no problem to have..

Why do you think it's not fun?

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untog
I'd be interested to know how this stacks up against HipChat. I'm not sure
what I'm missing out on, but it would be good to hear if there is something.

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fourk
The major advantage I see with this over HipChat is that you can use existing
IRC client software to connect. Personally, I'd much prefer Irssi in a
terminal to an Adobe AIR product.

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untog
I can see the reasons for that, but the HipChat application lets you drag and
drop files to share them with everyone in a room, auto-loads images... that
alone is worth the client app to me.

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dgavey
You can do that with HTML5 (I suspect it's coming soon)

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antoncohen
Awesome, this service is needed. I had the job of finding/implementing an
outside-accessible group chat service for a startup. I wanted Campfire, but
one of the founders didn't like newfangled web chat and required it be
traditional IRC.

Setting up open source IRC servers is a pain. They are almost completely void
of documentation. And as the article points out, IRC doesn't usually have the
traditional username/passwords or access controls you really need for business
group chat.

I realize this is an MVP. Here are somethings I think should be included:

* Groups. It makes it way easier to manage access controls.

* A way to invite outsiders. The specific use case is inviting customers to join a chat, without the customer taking up a user/license seat.

* You've probably done these but I can't tell from the website; persistent chat rooms and varying admin privileges (ops in some rooms, not others, ability to create rooms, etc.).

EDIT: Why was my comment down voted?

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samstave
This would be cool if it included what I think is the most useful aspect of
IRC for teams: trainable IRC bots.

Back in 1999 - I used IRC to manage my IT org. We had two IT channels: one for
IT staff, which we were all required to be logged into when on the clock - and
another that was company wide, where users could jump on IRC to ask the
IT/dev/support teams questions.

We used bots to train IT FAQ and system info...

So for example, we would type "DNS Server" and the bot would reply with the IP
of the DNS server.

We could type in a hostname and the bot would reply with the system details we
put in there.

So, i this had the capability of learning and storing data that was
retrievable in this way, rather than simple search, I think it could be very
useful.

User:"Whats the current version of ProductX"

Bot:"Product X current version is 1.1.2"

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xpaulbettsx
Hubot has this feature, and it also has an IRC adapter.

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akavlie
Hmm, I just started working on an open source web-based IRC client a couple of
weeks ago. This takes a bit of the wind out of my sails.

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Technicolour
Something that works with existing irc servers would still be fantastic.

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akavlie
Yeah, the cient looks pretty fantastic, but the apparent limitation of working
with Grove-hosted servers does limit its usefulness.

If you're interested, here's my client so far:

<http://web-irc.nodester.com/>

<https://github.com/akavlie/web-irc>

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erikb
Maybe it's just in my circles like this, but I think these days chat itself is
no service anymore. You need to integrate it into something else, like social
networks, gtalk, skype (chat+telephone), "webcam-services". 10 years ago Grove
might've been awesome, but now it feels like something is missing, because I
can chat everywhere else contextrelated anyway.

Look how meebo developed over the last years. First it integrated web and
traditional chat media like ICQ, MSN and then they already moved on to
integrate their chat services into other peoples web-businessmodels as a b2b
service.

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maximusprime
Meebo also took $ SEVENTY million in funding.

When you take that sort of investment, the rules of the game change a lot I
think. It's no longer sufficient to make a few million profit a month.

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erikb
You are right, there is a possible niche that is probably profitable. Thus the
businessmodel might be valid, even if they have no chance of hitting any main
stream markets (with the businessmodel they have right now).

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cpr
Nice work, Leah! Love the fact that it's just IRC at heart.

Is there any way to integrate a file-uploading facility (drag'n'drop in the
web client, ideally, like Campfire) to the IRC concept, or is that an
impedance mismatch?

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leahculver
Thanks!! I'd love to add some file uploading and/or hosting capability. I
think it would be easy enough on the website side of things but I'm not sure
yet what it would mean for existing IRC clients.

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inportb
Let your services bot announce the user and url, perhaps?

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dabeeeenster
Is it going to remain free? Would consider moving our internal irc server here
but am concerned that in a few months it will become pay only?

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leahculver
No, it won't remain free forever. Soon we'll having pricing plans that are
comparable to existing team chat products.

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sinope
How unfortunate.

I've been working on an open source version of what you're purporting to
provide as a service.

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akavlie
Open source software != free service -- in fact, even when the software is
open source, you usually have to pay for a hosted, managed service.

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sinope
I can make an automatic heroku application. I even have a guy who works at
Heroku that would help me do it.

I could charge instance-hours for a prefabbed EC2 instance image too.

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tilgovi
Do it.

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EricButler
I've been beta testing irccloud.com. It's very well done, but I'd also like
something that can be self-hosted to access internal-only IRC servers.

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sofuture
I like irccloud.com quite a lot. A bit different of a product, but still very
nice.

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strick
Grove looks very cool. But groupme is free and has a good iphone/android
client that a non-technical user can setup and use. Push notifications work
great.

But Grove intrigues me for the ability to hook up useful bots to IRC.

If Groupme had an API available now, I'm not sure Grove would offer any
benefits for my purposes. But I love how this space is exploding with all
sorts of cool services.

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uniclaude
Looks great, I'd love to try it, but I had an error 500 while attempting to
register. Being an IRC fan, I believe a service like this will really help me
to convince my workmates to talk over something else than Google Talk or
Skype.

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shintoist
Just keep trying, I got 500s a couple of times too.

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leahculver
Sorry, our server is swamped right now. I'm working on it...

Update: I've made a few tweaks and it should be better now. _fingers crossed_

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uniclaude
Works fine now! Thanks.

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derpapst
Cool idea. However, I am missing the method to auto-group chats by topic.
Would be nice to have it with IRC.

Currently, I am doing that (not with IRC, but with Jabber/XMPP) via my side-
project <http://TwoToReal.com> (beta): You ask questions (or raise topics) for
which automatically determined experts are then pulled in via IM into a real-
time web chat (most of the knobs/switches are tuned by machine learning).

What are your pricing plans?

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derpapst
Not sure whether it is in your vision as well, but wouldn't it be cool if
Grove.io offered a library of such IRC agents in the same manner as HuBot from
GitHub?

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leahculver
I think this is a super cool idea and it's something I've been thinking a lot
about. Right now, existing IRC bots work fine with Grove but it would be
cooler to have more integration.

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derpapst
Could even open a market of such bots for you: Customers of Grove.io could
then offer their bots in your IRC bot market place ... but now I'm just
dreaming ;-)

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idle_processor
>Geeks love IRC, but it comes with a few hassles, mainly having to host it,
that have led teams away from using it in favor of easier IM solutions.

The nature of IRC's channel-level organization¹ obviates the need to set up
independent servers for a given team group.

What advantage does something like this offer me over just opening a new
channel on freenode?

¹I.e., access lists (ops, voice) and modes like +psk (p[rivate], s[ecret], and
k[eyed]).

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gwillen
Technically Freenode doesn't allow the creation of random channels for any
purpose; they are required to be for some open project or open source
software. (I say this as a member of quite a number of random channels on
Freenode; but they could technically crack down at any time, and I would not
recommend this approach for corporate use.)

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razzaj
But aren't the hassles one of the aspects us "geeks" like about IRC? I think
us "geeks" deep inside love the terminal, having to setup an IRC client on a
hosted server and tweaking the settings, getting our hands dirty. Us, "geeks",
love also the sense of exclusivity that the barrier to entry to IRC provides.
Take that, and the hassles, away and it becomes yet another chat network.

~~~
jaequery
think you have a valid point there.

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arbales
The Do team has been using Grove for a while now, and we're really liking it.
The web app supports embedded content and gravatars, and connecting via IRC is
great for those who love it.

We used Convore in the past, and Grove has definitely encapsulated the best
parts of Convore along with laser-focused features and great performance. We
actually can't wait to be a (or the first?) paying customer.

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jhsu
this is awesome, mixing a bit of irc + campfire. really like the ability for
users to pick web interface or their own irc client.

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gojomo
Will its model work well with an open source/community project – where you
want to allow all walk-up participants, but need some moderator powers?

For example, can you edit the searchable logs to remove spam?

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leahculver
I can actually think of a few good reasons why you might want to remove
messages as a moderator. We'll add this soon.

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robinduckett
And I already crashed my instance. Can no longer connect via IRC, only web
client. Connected Hubot to it and did a help with all the scripts installed.
Flooding ensued. Now it doesn't work.

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TheSmoke
what happened to convore?

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maximusprime
I don't think people wanted to use it.

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pwang
I dunno, I was pretty happy with it. It was really nice to have at
conferences. Like any social medium, there's a tough chicken-and-egg nut to
crack. I'm going to try to use it at Supercomputing next week.

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joelhaasnoot
Looks great, now time to convince my cofounders we need it...

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jamesu
I was thinking something like this would come in handy the other day. Goes to
show if you have an idea, chances are someone else is already thinking about
it.

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tlrobinson
Neat.

Easy hosted custom plugins/bots would be awesome.

You can run your own IRC bot, of course, but then you have to worry about
finding a server to run it on, keep it running, etc.

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leahculver
Agreed. We need to figure out a good way to do better bot integration!
(suggestions welcome)

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tlrobinson
I'd probably start with a configurable bot with a few predefined plugins (RSS
feeds, version control / bug tracker integration, etc) and a configuration UI
(similar to Github's Services hooks)

Eventually you could add a way to define custom plugins that are properly
sandboxed.

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Xylakant
You're describing <http://hubot.github.com/> which ist pretty much a
configurable bot with a few scripts and an irc adapter. It doesn't have a
configuration page though.

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kenneth_reitz
I've been using this lightly for about a month now and it's a fantastic
service. I hope it's wildly successful.

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Xylakant
Now if it only were possible to get the github commit hooks working with
this... Coding time I guess.

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pferde
Too bad silcnet.org is dead. It would probably be a better base for such chat
application than irc.

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bryogenic
No /me implemented. :(

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robot
would be great to integrate with github

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jorde
You should be able to use Hubot with Grove as it provides IRC interface. We
have few users already using it.

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injekt
Assuming you'll have to create an entirely new Grove account for each bot you
want to add, though?

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arbales
That's fairly typical though.

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mml
i was wishing that this existed a few weeks ago. win. now i don't have to
implement it.

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flexterra
Love the idea.

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kaichanvong
A website exists which is already here to pwn this space.

Facebook.

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dstrom
great idea

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grover
I've been using grove IRC for a while now. If you use the irc.grove.bz server
instead of the .io server, you can create channels without registration.

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3th3r
oh wow this is amazing!! thanks!!

