radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Christian Loosli]

Am Dienstag, 8. August 2017, 21:52:12 CEST schrieb Jonathan Riddell:
> On 8 August 2017 at 19:51, Christian Loosli <kde at fuchsnet.ch> wrote:
> > Out of interest: what exactly does IRC lack? There are 4 things coming to
> > mind
> > for me, all of them with my personal opinion:
> Option for full names, 

IRC has the GECOS field, in most clients even called real name,  _exactly_ for 
that reason. 
Some people (e.g. me) use it for that: their real name. 
This is part of the protocol and has been for ages.

> photos of people,

Some clients, like kvirc, have support for that as well.
See below.

> timezone,

can be added as metadata if wanted, we (freenode) do support it.
(we support arbitrary string metadata, we just no longer display it by default 
because people thought it would be hilarious to do antivirus signatures or 
ASCII porn, not kidding) 

> e-mail addresses.

mandatory field on freenode, just hidden by default for privacy reasons, but 
can be configured to be shown for those who want to (I wouldn't recommend it, 
to be honest). 

So out of these: one that isn't supported out of the box on all clients, being 
a picture or avatar. Whether that makes sense in channels like #kde with ~500 
users is imo a bit debatable, and definitely a bandwith and ressource hog. 

> Looking at #kde-devel just now it says:
> <-- swati_27 (uid130066 at gateway/web/irccloud.com/x-abaollxcgicrxgwg)
> has quit (Quit: Connection closed for inactivity)
> <-- nowrep (~david at kde/developer/drosca) has quit (Quit: Konversation
> terminated!)
> <-- stikonas (~gentoo at wesnoth/translator/stikonas) has quit (Quit:
> Konversation terminated!)
> <-- soee_ (~soee at bmi112.neoplus.adsl.tpnet.pl) has quit (Quit:
> Konversation terminated!)
> --> soee (~soee at bmi112.neoplus.adsl.tpnet.pl) has joined #kde-devel
> 
> Show that to most people and they'll just not want to know what it means

Good thing every single client coming to mind has a feature to hide these, 
including the official KDE client Konversation. 

http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/hide_join_part_messages

I'm rather sure that most other protocols, at least Telegram most certainly 
does, do also show when someone joined or parted a group, mind. 
The part they might hide is the  nick!ident at host part. This is client 
dependent, some do and quite a lot of them can hide it. So I wouldn't really 
recommend switching to a completely different protocol due to "shows 
additional info when someone joins or leaves the group". 
 
> Jonathan

Christian