IRCCloud's company blog covers the hosted IRC client, with posts on IRCv3, Slack integration, bouncers, pastebins and open-sourcing its mobile apps.
HN commenters link it to correct claims about paid bouncer support and to show IRCv3 features, Slack integration and pastebin handling.
Slack is a widely used product, but its use is tiny compared to IRC. IRC isn't just tech people, it's very widely used by a really huge, diverse range of people.
Your original comment said 'the days of simplistic IRC protocols are gone' and then you gave a bunch of features with the implication that simple protocols can't handle those features.
I simply explained why those features are absolutely implementable over simple protocols, and also why IRC isn't actually a simple protocol - DCC is an example of something not at all simple in IRC.
I didn't say that IRC itself, in its current incarnation, solves those problems.
Ultimately you're basically saying 'I want a couple of features and because slack provides them, I'm going to justify my use of slack by comparing slack to the least featureful chat thing out there: IRC'. IRC's strengths aren't its features, it's its openness, familiarity, hackability, conceptual simplicity and community control. In fact, the things people that like IRC dislike most about it are the few parts that aren't open, hackable, simple or controlled by the community.
I don't particularly like IRC as a protocol. Maybe its time has come, maybe the replacement will be called 'IRCv3' or 'IRCv4' or called something else. Whether that replacement is called 'IRC' is not important. What is important is that it remains open (in spirit and in practice), hackable, simple and controlled by the community. Slack replaces a distributed, network-failure-proof…
Hi, one of the irccloud team. Can answer any questions if you like.
Some info:
* Erlang, haproxy, rabbitmq, redis, postgres, cassandra, chef
* 10+ billion irc lines stored at the last count
* Thousands of IPv6 IRC connections - we give each user their own IPv6 address. Main site also works over ipv6.
* Thousands of IPv4 connections too
* Open source android and ios apps: https://blog.irccloud.com/mobile-apps-open-sourced/
* API: https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview
* Details on our security, password storage, etc: https://www.irccloud.com/privacy
I've mentioned this on HN before, but we moved our hosting off Hetzner and on to Black Lotus for the ddos-protection.
We see fairly frequent ddos attacks, from a few hundred mbit to 10+ gbit. They aren't impacting service since we moved to black lotus.
I use irccloud and I go on the DarkScience[0] IRCd. I even went as far as paying for the 1 year, I like just having it all in 1 client that never drops. I know I can setup a bouncer, but oh well. I prefer smaller communities. When I need programming or OS help I go on freenode where plenty of language communities are. Edit: Found out irccloud now supports connection bouncing, so you can use any irc client with them too[1].
[0]: https://www.darkscience.net/
[1]: https://blog.irccloud.com/bouncer/
When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integration/sidebyside-irccloud.png and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?
Some clients will intercept multi-line messages and let you POST the content to a pastebin. That way, supported clients show pretty-printed code and unsupported client just see a URL.
Ex: https://blog.irccloud.com/pastebins/
That's not correct, they are offering a bouncer if you are a paid customer: https://blog.irccloud.com/bouncer/