Idiot thinks you should use IRC instead of Slack
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You can't accept the fact that I could actually be right? I'm sorry, here's something to console you.
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Stop lying.
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Editing to insert more lies, actually. Since they must be lies. What the fuck is wrong with you?
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Who would ever entrust someone this childish with moderator powers? At least you haven't abused them yet.
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Wow.
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WOW.
<a
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Why does everyone keep ignoring the fact that you can literally have enterprise SSO for IRC?
Why the fuck would you?
If you want chat with Enterprise SSO there's a fucktonne of better ways than IRC.
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@rc4 said:
Why does everyone keep ignoring the fact that you can literally have enterprise SSO for IRC?
Why the fuck would you?
If you want chat with Enterprise SSO there's a fucktonne of better ways than IRC.
Which I have said a thousand times in this thread, but if you have to use IRC, then there are better ways of doing it than requiring manual registration.
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then there are better ways of doing it than requiring manual registration.
I'll grant you that ... if you are so daft to use it in an enterprise environment there are solutions to mitigate the problem points mentioned like logging on, authentication, nick retention, channel discovery etc.
That leaves us to the part where most people where talking about: the IRC environment is a usability turd for normal people.
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Exactly. I would strongly recommend something like Lync over IRC, but IRC can be configured to be decent for corporate deployments. It's very extensible.
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Exactly.
So we agree?
he IRC environment is a usability turd for normal people.
Thanks! I knew I used the exact right words to get my message across.
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I was repeating the main point of what you'd said. It's very common to do this in the United States.
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Indeed and then you walked around the turd in the middle of the room.
Is that a US thing too?
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Is that a US thing too?
Well, generally, we try to avoid stepping in shit in the US. So...yes, I suppose.
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Smart, shit on your shoes can stink up the place for days.
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Indeed and then you walked around the turd in the middle of the room.
Is that a US thing too?
is wrong with Belgium that you shit on the floor?
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is wrong with ■■■■■■■ that you shit on the floor?me? do we need to call in CSI:Belgium to investigate who created the turd?
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Maybe I could use Slack or whatever other shitty app is en vogue this week among ADHD-ridden hipsters, but I just don't want to because I have a setup that already works, and so does literally everyone else at the company except for the occasional super special snowflake who can't take 60 seconds to master a simple chat interface?
So it works for everyone except the people it doesn't work for. Makes... sense?
Those are the products you're complaining about, despite having seemingly never used any of them.
I have used one, and recently. It was ass. Fried ass.
If you have, and you spent more than a minute or two "figuring out" how to chat on IRC, then a better word to describe your grey matter would be... scarce, maybe? The problem is you.
I figured out how to chat. That's not at all the point, which you're still utterly missing.
It also doesn't say any of that, what are you talking about?
Well nobody ever makes jokes on this comedy forum, so I guess it can't be a joke-- not sure what it was. Small seizure perhaps?
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This is what NickServ is for. Solving the impersonation problem.
But that's not part of IRC, that's a shitty awful "solution" someone built on top of IRC specifically because the IRC protocol is so fucking terrible that it didn't anticipate that need.
Oh and because it's built on top of IRC, natch is has a terrible user experience. Because the only way to send it directions is to "chat" with it. Standard login/pass dialog? Can't use it on IRC! Why would you be able to? That's ridiculous.
The server admins run some bot, when you connect to the server it messages you and says "Oi, gimme your password" or "This nickname is unregistered, to claim it message me back 'register some password'". You don't give it a password, it boots you off the server. Easy to interface with, very common.
If you think that's "easy to interface with" then you're disqualified from every judging the usability of software ever. Because you have no fucking clue.
I get the feeling that you have never used IRC.
I have, but I didn't use the "nickserv" because I have no passwords I feel comfortable giving in plaintext (because you just chat to it like a person, it's all plaintext of course-- IRC also has shitty "security" if you can even call it security) and I wasn't going to make up and memorize a new password for a dumb chat client I'd already decided I wasn't going to use again.
I'm not in the position of choosing a chat product to use for something.
That's a relief.
It's named "Mibbit", I was using slashes for /emphasis/ because I'm not familiar with discomarkup. Is it emphasis? Oh that's what I should have done.
Using slashes like that to indicate italics is the common and obvious thing to do when writing plaintext, therefore Markdown doesn't use it. Because why would it.
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But that's not part of IRC, that's a shitty awful "solution" someone built on top of IRC specifically because the IRC protocol is so fucking terrible that it didn't anticipate that need.
From the standpoint of the user it is. The interface is everything, right?
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I don't think I understand how the usability of IRC differs from Slack.
Then you've never used Slack.
Even if you ignore all the features it has that IRC doesn't (and there are a million of those) and stick to just sending text to people, it's still 10,000 times better at that.
For example, going up a couple replies, if I put a password into Slack to protect my username, it gets encrypted and hashed-- not sent in plaintext.
except with IRC I can pick a client I like and customize it however I want, if I feel so inclined, while apparently with Slack I'm stuck with whatever they give me and maybe I can change some colors or something.
If you used Slack, you wouldn't want to pick another client. Because there ain't any that are better.
A lot (and I do mean a lot) of OSS products have little to no good documentation. There are good ones too (and that's why I don't think it's the philosophy that's the problem, just asshole/lazy developers) but IRC is a good example of a system where the docs leave much to be desired.
Here's the web client Ben L showed me. Try to figure out what the "Auth to services" checkbox does. I dare you. (Also note the lowercase S in services. Sentence-case in a button caption? Goddamned open source people can't get anything right, can they?)
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Open source slack alternative for Blakeyhttp://www.mattermost.org/
That's great. If there's one thing those "innovative" open source developers are good at, it's reactively ripping-off a commercial entity's product.
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Oh no, he did. Spent like half an hour trying to figure out the syntax for registering on NickServ, then gave up, called us all idiots for using shitty software and left.
I figured out the syntax, I couldn't figure out how to make a secure password for it (spoiler alert: you can't), then I decided I didn't want to make a brand new completely insecure password used solely for reserving my name on a shitty chat product I'd never use again and left.
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I remember mIRC...I remember trying it out and hating it with a passion, specifically. For what purposes I still use IRC these days, I make do with a fork of Pidgin, and occasionally rant about how much I miss Xircon. But then I'm a bit odd.
On a slightly more related note: I found IRC easy to adopt, and would not expect the general populace to find it easy to adopt.
I'm not sure any of the descriptions of Slack so far sound like a significant improvement over a corporate XMPP server and using a client with a decent MUC-selection interface, but if you're okay with the server-not-in-house aspect I can see how avoiding the server setup and client selection aspects might be appealing.
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Even assuming you mean that IT professionals should know about it, you're still ignoring the younger IT professionals, who have had the listed technologies available to them.
One of the comments on the linked article says something like:
Good LUCK getting people who grew up on Live Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger-- where they've ALWAYS been able to share emotes, style text, drag-and-drop upload of files and images-- to migrate to IRC which has NONE of those features.
(Which, BTW, even I used AIM long before I first-tried IRC. And I ain't even close to "young." The reason I even got as far as I did is because I'd played MUDs and BBSes in the past, which are similarly shitty.)
I think the real problem is that this person is campaigning against Slack just because he doesn't like it, but he's being forced to use it because other people use it.
Right but that's not how he wrote the article; he wrote it as if he were making an argument that IRC was a better product, which is so ridiculous as to be laughable. Which is why I posted it here.
Since IRC is a text-based protocol you could literally use telnet.
Great; now I want to upload this Excel sheet to our data ops guy-- let's just open up telnet.exe and-- OH WAIT that is the stupidest "feature" of anything I've ever heard of.
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What's there to figure out? Set up an account on the server.
IRC has no such thing as "an account". Seriously, peeps, stop bullshitting me. I am not as stupid as you seem to think I am.
It has a robot that kind of sort of pretends to be an authorization mechanism, but is not secured in any way and has really shitty usability. Apparently it's named Nick.
But it doesn't have accounts.
It may not have fancy file sharing or whatever...but it's pretty simple IME.
It doesn't even save scrollback. If I disconnect for even a second, those messages are lost forever. (And yes I know you can set up another bot, maybe it's name is Gary, to stay connected as your proxy and log messages but here's that great Blakeyrat refrain again: why the fuck should you have to?)
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Why does everyone keep ignoring the fact that you can literally have enterprise SSO for IRC?
Yeah and when you log in you can literally have super models descend from the ceiling on cables wearing Victoria's Secret wings and hit the enter button for you.
It can be done.
Therefore, IRC is the best chat protocol ever.
This argument is rock-solid and cannot be refuted.
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IRC has no such thing as "an account". Seriously, peeps, stop bullshitting me.
If we're going to this level of dickweedery, you've never used IRC, either.
@boomzilla said:
It may not have fancy file sharing or whatever...but it's pretty simple IME.
It doesn't even save scrollback. If I disconnect for even a second, those messages are lost forever.I'm not sure what your point is in replying like that here.
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That said, it's also dogshit compared to Slack.
I tried to like Slack when my uni group started using it, I tried to like it when TDWTF started using it, and it's... eh.
For offline communication, where the participants aren't online at the same time, it's far too disorganized - and sadly it seems that's how lots of places try to use it, not as a chatroom replacement.
As for IRC, it's always been a geek toy - but then again so was the Internet in itself back when IRC was popular. Nowadays there's no real push to create a modern IRC client because nobody but geeks hangs out on IRC - casual users had webchats with all bells, whistles and emoticons for a long time now.
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casual users had webchats with all bells, whistles and emoticons for a long time now.
And now we have Discourse!
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Did you ever have to use shit like IRCle? I used that shit for years, because it was all I could get on mac.
If IRC is really usable over Telnet, you should have tried Rapscallion. Sure it was technically for MUDs, but it looks a shitload better than what you were actually using there.
#InformationThatMightHaveBeenUseful15YearsAgo
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This looks like a good time to point out that the official TDWTF IRC channel is
actually right here:Regarding Slack vs IRC, they are for different audience.
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And it's about a million times more complicated to figure out than what Slack offers right out of the box.
I bet you it's not a million times more complicated.
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Great; now I want to upload this Excel sheet to our data ops guy-- let's just open up telnet.exe and-- OH WAIT that is the stupidest "feature" of anything I've ever heard of.
It's not a feature, you dumbass. It's like saying being able to type
GET / HTTP/1.1into telnet is a "feature" of HTTP.
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But that's not part of IRC, that's a shitty awful "solution" someone built on top of IRC specifically because the IRC protocol is so fucking terrible that it didn't anticipate that need.
Oh and because it's built on top of IRC, natch is has a terrible user experience. Because the only way to send it directions is to "chat" with it. Standard login/pass dialog? Can't use it on IRC! Why would you be able to? That's ridiculous.
Just like a lot of stuff in the open-source world, it's cobbled together by neckbeards who would rather proselytize their hacky/arcane/dated/crappy software/protocol/ecosystem/turd than design something usable from the ground up.
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I use HexChat for Windows. Is this really so unusable?
The font alone makes me want to barf.
Yeah, so HTTP is TRWTF too?
Maybe you should be asking yourself why IRC clients still look like that shitty screenshot you posted and not like Slack. Websites today look substantially better than websites in 1997. IRC? Looks exactly the same. (Actually the Mac one Yami posted looks better, because it has that awesome Mac Classic styling and readable fonts.) Why's that?
Maybe because it's only used/controlled by luddite open source assholes who think no software written after 1985 is worthwhile? Hmm!
And of course you're still missing/ignoring the fact that Slack supports a TON of stuff the IRC protocol does not and will not ever support. Like persistent scrollback. No matter how fancy your client is, you can't get that without updating the server to the 21st century.
IRC literally does all of this.
You fucking liar!
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@FrostCat said:
Sure, it's so hard that
teenagers--shit, probably pre-teens--nerdshave been doing it for literally 25 years. "go to mirc.com, install application, go to server whatever.com, type "/join #somechannel".I like how you throw your own argument under the bus in one sentence! +1
No, your stupid edit to my comment would have thrown it under the bus had I made it. I stand by what I said. I used to use IRC a lot when I was younger, particularly before most multiplayer games had online chat, and yes, I knew a lot of teens down to 13 and possibly younger that used it.
I don't see why that's such a difficult concept. My son could turn on my computer, put a CD in the drive and start playing games all on his own by the time he was like 3, after being showed how a couple of times. Installing mIRC isn't rocket science.
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The font alone makes me want to barf.
Oh yeah, it totally isn't changeable.
You fucking liar!
Your inability to read isn't my fault.
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From the standpoint of the user it is. The interface is everything, right?
Yes; and the interface is shit.
But I'm also sick of these IRC supporters blatantly lying about what is part of IRC and what isn't. I don't know how stupid they think I am, but it's definitely not helping my opinion of their intelligence.
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It may not have fancy file sharing or whatever
miRC had file sharing 15 years ago. Just sayin'.
I have actually never heard of Slack before this past fall when I started seeing ads for it on Hulu. Everything I know about it comes from their content-free ad, and what I've read in this thread.
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I mean, except for the one I run. I don't think either is official? Except one is dedicated.
Kiwi IRC
