Not necessarily disagreeing but could someone provide some solid examples of IRC being a terrible user experience? Whenever IRC comes up, people say it lost and it’s not the right technology. When pressed, they wave their hands around saying “...because, uh, user experience reasons!” As a longtime user of IRC, I’m probably blind to these issues. What’s so bad about it that causes people to put up with these inadequate “cloud” re-implementations?
Too hard? I installed mIRC on my own at age ~12 in the late 90s and I don't remember having any issues, the only thing you had to do was to type a nickname and choose a server. Nowadays it's even more simpler since you don't even need to install a client (qwebirc, kiwiirc, etc.).
Sure. 12-year-olds who go on to be software developers can install it. That says nothing about the user experience of the bottom quartile of users in terms of technical aptitude.
I'd agree that it's possible there are some discoverability issues, but i don't see where '/server irc.(efnet|freenode|etc.)' is bordering on impossible.
Threads have been super useful for us, we have a few channels that are forums by social agreement where long running discussions are recorded to make it easy to reference. We found this style to be easier to review then breaking off separate channels per topic and we generally use it for initial feature exploration. Once something moves into the category of "We're doing this" we split off a channel and isolate the discussion.
You need a bouncer if you need access to history, that is a deal breaker for most people. Also, being able to ping somebody via a push message on their mobile is also a nice thing when working in a remote team. Apps on mobile are also not that nice.
That being said, I wish there was a better open source alternative.
