One feature I really miss in a lot of chat clients (that this doesn't appear to have) is the ability to reply to specific messages, like in Stack Exchange chat or Telegram. It makes it a lot easier to follow several simultaneous conversations, or groups with many members.
I've always thought of the main IRC channel like being in a crowded room. You can listen in on various conversations, but if you want to have a conversation with one or more people, you move to another location and converse amongst yourselves either by private message or another (tempoarary) channel.
Threaded conversations are better handled by email or newsgroups as opposed to chat in my opinion.
I don't think that's really feasible with IRC unless you invent your own extension to the standard and then convince every other IRC client to adopt it.
Couldn't it be done in the UI by referencing the line/message ID, kinda like how forums "quote" the message you clicked Reply on, or 4ch references a link back to the one you're quoting?
Let a user click the timestamp to the left of the messages (or a "#" or other symbol), which inserts something like this into the reply box:
> Replying to username:
Then your message you send ends up looking like:
> Reply to username: I agree!
Clicking on "Reply to username" or just the username could scroll back the chat and highlight the message you replied to.
One problem with IRC is that everyone is using a different client. It's like how you can set it up so you receive messages when you're offline... but nobody else does that, so it's not a real solution.
Of course, the context here is a client that does indeed implement extra features, and you're right that a text format per message would be an interesting way to implement this: the client could simply hide those messages from the normal view and slot them into the thread system. People using other clients would just see some extraneous line noise like "Replying to <username>|<timestamp>: hello world".
Yeah exactly, it's still "useful" to people without the client just by showing them it's a reply to someone else, even without the embedded link and extra functionality the client adds. I think it's a good compromise.
