

Show HN: IRCRelay - Hosted IRC Bouncer Service - mitchellh
https://www.ircrelay.com/

======
avree
Making me enter payment info to try it out makes this a non-starter for me.

There's not enough information on the main page as to how it actually works or
who is behind for me to be comfortable just plugging my credit card into a
random site.

I like the concept, though, and would probably pay for something like this if
there were more details on how it works. Right now, I have SSL/unlimited
message archive/unlimited connections by using screen + irssi and a cheap
(less than $12/mo) VPS.

~~~
mitchellh
I'm sorry to hear that. Here is a page about us and who is behind it:
<https://www.ircrelay.com/about>

A high level overview of how it works: When you sign up, we provision a
private ZNC installation on EC2 for you. It is multi-tenant, but we leverage
various mechanisms for security: passwords are one-way hashed, each ZNC
process runs as a separate unix user for each IRCRelay user, file permissions
are such that no other ZNC user can read another users config even if there
was an exploit, etc.

As for the payment: We only wanted to sign up people who were serious about
using the service, and asking for payment details up front is a way to do
this. All payments are done through stripe, and we don't see the CC details,
ever. Your card is not charged until after the 30 day trial, and we send a
warning email a few days prior so you can cancel your account if you're not
happy.

But thanks for checking it out!

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Since you are using a separate ZNC instance for each user, what are prospects
of allowing users to install (or choose from a pre-selected list of) third-
party ZNC extensions? In my case, I wrote a service-agnostic push notification
module for ZNC [1] that I think would be a decent additional feature for you
to compete with services like IRCCloud or TapChat.

1: <https://github.com/jreese/znc-push>

~~~
pavel_lishin
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that people who are even aware of what ZNC
is would be able to run their own instance on a server under their control.

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ChuckMcM
In general its a nice service, it seems to cover all the IRC bases.

I'm wondering though if there is a bigger offering here somewhere, something
which would basically provide a termination point for all of your real time
interactive communication sessions. Paired with a set of tools that let you
connect to that termination point from a variety of devices might unify a
bunch of services that are currently fragmented.

For example, the various chat clients that federated AIM/Yahoo/Jabber were a
way to terminate all your chat context and then to attach or detach from it at
will. They still didn't get the "Oh I left my gmail running at home so your
gchat went there and now opening gmail at work I don't know that you're
wondering why I'm not responding" problem.

Clearly federating IRC, Chat, Twitter, and SMS could have some interesting
benefits, especially if you're able to re-connect, back up the timeline to the
point where you disconnected, and play back to present.

Anyway, IRC is but one piece of that puzzle.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think bitlbee will let you cram your various non-IRC instant messengers into
an IRC-like interface. I've never used it, but it seems like an easy first
step.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I actually use bitlbee with ZNC on a daily basis, and there are some rough
edges, like seeing users as giant numbers (G+ ids) when connected to GTalk if
they aren't in your buddy list, but it otherwise works really well, and I'm
always happy to centralize all my "realtime" communications into my IRC
client.

~~~
philsnow
I think there is an option to make bitlbee extract the handle from some other
field, like "full name", then 05327fykex6h5yvd457 becomes JohnConner or
whatever. Have a look at a recent version of the docs.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Yep, I already use that, but it only works for people in your Gtalk "friends"
list or somesuch, so I still see that for anyone who contacts me that I
haven't talked to previously.

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mrcharles
This seems like a great idea, but I am absolutely not going to give credit
card info at the beginning of a trial. Shame, I would have liked to try it
out.

~~~
johnbender
Honest question:

If they had asked you to pay for the service up front without a trial would it
have made a difference?

Would it be better marketing to call it a "free month" instead of a trial?

I think that most people who might use this have some idea what an IRC Proxy
is. That makes me wonder if it isn't better to just call it a free month to
avoid these "why am I paying for a trial" issues.

~~~
mrcharles
No, and no.

The issue here is: 1\. I have never used this kind of service before. 2\. I am
not sure I would be willing to pay for it. 3\. I am exactly the kind of person
who would pay $5 a month for the convenience factor. 4\. I am also the kind of
person who would completely forget to cancel and then get billed, even if I
didn't use it.

Basically, a free trial with credit card info attached, for me, isn't a free
trial, it's a post-billing situation.

~~~
pearkes
We will send you an email before billing your card. We're also very open to
fixing issues around accidental billing - sometimes I forget to cancel in time
as well.

~~~
Spoom
I know if I saw something like that explanation on the page asking for CC
details, I would be much more likely to acquiesce. If you, say, offered a
refund if someone emailed requesting one within a week(?) of their paid term
starting, it would go a long way.

~~~
pearkes
Interesting. I'm definitely going to add something around the fact that we'll
a) remind them and b) be flexible in dire situations. Thanks for the feedback!

------
pearkes
Me and @mitchellh built this as a side project.

Really appreciate any feedback, and we're happy to answer questions here.
Thanks!

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jwpeddle
I love the idea of this, but the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost when I can
get a VPS for less.

EDIT: that said, I do normally only use 2 networks, and I'm fine with the
first tier cost. It's just those occasional times I need to connect to a third
network. Also I'm not sure how much 10000 messages is, but I imagine idling in
a freenode channel could tear through that pretty quickly.

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klinquist
Neat. However, installing ZNC on your own an Amazon EC2 micro instance is
cheaper.

~~~
mitchellh
Yes, it is certainly cheaper.

You're paying [a very small amount] to IRCRelay for convenience and not having
to worry about it. At least for my close friends, they'd rather pay $5 a month
than deal with setting up an EC2 instance or VPS to do this for them.

~~~
jspthrowaway2
I'm not looking to pick a fight with you, I'm just illustrating the thought
process that goes into something like this (at least, mine). To help you
understand your market better.

\- screen and irssi is a far better experience than using a bouncer. Perhaps
offer that? These services, back in the day, used to be "shell providers" for
this reason.

\- Most developers I know run their own VPS and probably wouldn't consider a
service like this.

\- I happily pay $20/month for my Linode wherein I do this, the big reason
being I can also torrent, compile, host quick Internet stuff, do development
work, receive mail, etc.

Administering a personal development machine is a gateway to becoming a better
hacker these days, so I think you'll find that your market ends up being
miscreants who have $5 to throw away on a throwaway bouncer to cause trouble.

~~~
klinquist
I personally prefer a bouncer to screen+irssi because I like Textual for OS X
so much :).

I definitely agree with your last point - the "irc types" also tend to the the
"hacker types" these days.

I think my micro instance was $54/yr, and like you mention, I can do a lot
more with it.

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aes256
I'm surprised Amazon allow IRC on EC2. A sizeable number of VPS providers
prohibit IRC usage; it makes them dDoS magnets and just isn't worth the hassle

~~~
jlgreco
Who doesn't allow IRC usage? VPS/ssh/screen/IRC seems to be one of the more
popular reasons for private individuals to use a VPS (well, at least most
people on IRC where I hang out seem to use a VPS).

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dsl
I'd highly recommend checking out <http://www.irccloud.com/>

I've started using it as my full time IRC client with Nimbus
<https://github.com/jnordberg/irccloudapp>

~~~
manish_gill
Not sure why you were downvoted. IRCCloud is a great service (though they've
been experience trouble recently with a lot of disconnection issues randomly)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Downvoted possibly because of form, I've seen a number of down votes on
comments to "Show HN:" posts that were essentially "This is better:
competitive link." It doesn't help the person showing us their tool because
the comment doesn't say _how_ its better. A better comment would be "I'm
currently using a competitive service X, and I really like features A, B, and
C, but don't like features P, Q,and R, your product seems to fix P and Q, but
doesn't offer B or C." which is evaluative against a competitive product (no
doubt the poster has done those evaluations as well but its useful to have
actual customers and their feedback.

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waxjar
From the comments here I understand you provide a ZNC bouncer. You should
advertise that, as your target audience is interested in those kind of
technical details.

ZNC provides plugins as well, will I be able to use those?

I'd advise you to drop or heavily increase the 10,000 message limit. A
moderately busy IRC channels would easily get 1,000 messages a day. Say I'd be
on freenode's #ruby, #node.js and #python, I'd be able to use your service for
3-4 days at most with some luck.

~~~
pearkes
The limit to what we store while you're not connected.- i.e, if you're on a
trip for a weekend and you come back, you get all of your messages fed back to
your client the next time you log in. This clears your limit back to 0,
effectively.

On ZNC - definitely good feedback to have a "How it works" page or something
of the sort for those who are interested.

~~~
waxjar
I totally misinterpreted that. My apologies.

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emperorcezar
Speaking of IRC persistence. Subway IRC
<https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway>

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EricButler
If you're an Android user, also check out my app TapChat:
<http://tapchatapp.com/>

~~~
grimgrin
I do love your app. Haven't used it in a month or so, but the one thing that
bothered me was how I could click on a message that contained a link, and
easily view the link, but I couldn't click on the topic to do the same thing.

Mostly curious if anyone has ever mentioned that to you before.

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flavien_bessede
Way too expensive. It's a damn bouncer heh.

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argarg
I took about one hour of my time and set up ZNC on my openwrt home router.
Since then I never worried about that...

------
jspthrowaway2
As someone who got his start in SaaS (though we didn't call it that then)
offering this exact service, Amazon is going to be very annoyed with you once
they're handling DDoS attacks on your behalf.

Be selective of your clients and cut loose quickly. There are people who will
sign up for your service just to go shit-talk on EFnet, and the wrong person
will result in your entire service going down.

