

Let's Chat – open source, self-hosted chat for small teams - sibartlett
http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/

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gcp
Explain me how this is better than IRC.

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hhaidar
IRC is a bit less accessible for non-technical people. We had a lot of trouble
getting our team to adopt it. It's not for everyone.

That's why products like Slack, HipChat, Campfire, etc exist.

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rakoo
I don't want to dismiss your efforts, but in the spirit of the original
question I'd like to know: Is it only a UI problem, or is there a problem with
IRC (the protocol) itself ?

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LamaOfRuin
The lack of persistence built into the protocol (and thus clients) is a big
problem for team communications. You can have a bot log your channel, but
they'll often have holes creep into the logs somehow, and for private
discussions require yet one more access control system.

Having a web irc client that provided a common backlog and search for all
users, instead of requiring things like znc to make that usable, would be
great. The private part is fraught though.

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gcp
/query?

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LamaOfRuin
/query command is news to me, but appears to be completely unrelated (I don't
really understand the naming).

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stephenr
Why does every attempt to improve user experience these days, make the
assumption that they need to rebuild the entire stack from scratch?

A really high quality web (maybe even HTML5 client-side only even?) XMPP
client would be a welcome thing. This, not so much.

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notsrg
This wasn't exactly "an attempt to improve user experience". It's a hack day
project that we use internally to help the different BU's communicate. The
bonus is we get to have fun with it because we wrote it.

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dddddannyyyyy
lacks offline mobile support :-(

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sibartlett
This is something can consider for a future release. Do you mean offline
message storage, so you can look at discussions offline?

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dddddannyyyyy
I want to see some (or a lot of?) chat history offline, and then send msgs
while offline. I don't want it to scan the network, delay loads, or blow up in
any way just because the network is down. Think about the Whatsapp or Telegram
experience, as opposed to Slack or Facebook Messenger. If you are in and out
of the subway, or in elevators, or just where there are spotty networks, the
mobile experience blows for anything but the super popular and consumery chat
services.

Unlike the people who can't figure out why this is better than IRC, I find a
ton of value in your project. After leaving Campfire, moving to Kato, and then
settling with Slack, I am really unhappy with the Slack mobile experience.

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sibartlett
Thank you for getting back to me. I'll open a feature request for this and see
if we can fit it into a future release.

