Hey there, I'm an admin on the IRCAnywhere help channel (Gnasher), and a friend of the creator. The project is currently discontinued. The creator currently has no time outside of work to dedicate to the project and make updates. Due to a lack of other contributors / pull-requests there won't really be much other development. If it interests you though, feel free to fork it or submit a pull-request. If they're good/appropriate I'll get it checked out and possibly merged in.
It would perhaps be best, up until today the website got only a trickle of traffic so no one bothered with it. It will probably be updated in the coming week or two to reflect the current status.
Will there be a sync of the read status of all messages? That is the feature that I need, the backlog is next to useless without me knowing where I stopped last time.
At the moment no further development is planned at all. So if you want this feature I'm afraid you'll have to build it yourself or find an alternative. There have been multiple mentioned in the thread, one in particular I have heard good things about is Shout-IRC.
If you're already running weechat, you might be interested in checking out Glowing Bear which accomplishes a very similar goal, but without reinventing the weel - it simply connects to you existing weechat (probably running on a server somewhere).
One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that you get the whole functionality of a mature IRC client. You also don't have to trust a third party with your data, as you're connecting to your own client, no middleman involved. It's just a bunch of static files.
I run it on a small dedicated server (kimsufi) in tmux. But instead of sshing into that, I connect to it with Glowing Bear which feels much nicer to me. I also like the mobile support (I use it a lot on my Android phone and my iPad). For Android, we even have a "native" app (using cordova). It's very convenient to have IRC on the go, with synced read marker states and a pleasant interface.
Neat idea, although I would probably stick with irssi[1] running on my server and connecting with mosh[2] to that for mobility with instant session resume.
I don't know if you've seen it, there is a fork of Glowing Bear that works with irssi instead of weechat. I don't know how complete it is (I work on the weechat version), but if you're interested, check out my other post and #glowing-bear on freenode!
well, there's a free tier that lets you keep 2 connections + irccloud's server. you just have to keep a web browser open somewhere to avoid the 2 hour timeout. but yea ive always felt their $5 / month plan was a little overpriced. for mobile irccloud's app is fantastic. i dont know if any of these solutions mentioned here even has one
Reminds me of http://quassel-irc.org/ which is not really a beauty but is working good enough for me at the moment.
(I'm just a user, not related to the project in any way)
I mean no disrespect here when I say that I have tried IRC anywhere and it is quite good, but as I'm sure you're aware the code maintainability is limited at best. There are workarounds, hacks and shortcuts taken here and there. Im not saying a full rework would be required but there are some of the fundamental issues to be taken care of.
If a team was willing to take it over (should the current owner allow), it would require a substantial investment of time.
Would the current owner // maintainer be open to the possibility of monetisation of a particular feature set // plugin system ? Something like own-cloud, whereby you could purchase a monetisation version to which you could have paying clients on your deployment.
While the free version would not have this particular feature.
Thoughts ?
Edit: The paid feature may also have the associated mobile app also etc. You'd be surprised the interest and community you would accumulate with a financial incentive.
I believe a plugin system was in the works, so paid plugins and the like might be a possibility. There would without a doubt be a lot of work to do on it, it's been over a year, and Node itself has changed dramatically not to mention ember.
As I've mentioned to other people in the thread, if you throw me an email at the address in my HN profile, I will gladly forward it / your questions.
This was previously discussed in the IRC Channel on Freenode. None of the people that have contributed have shown interest in taking over the project. And the majority of the community we have don't know their way around JS/Node outside of installing it on their server.
Spoke to him on freenode. He is not interested in passing maintainer to anyone. Wants to hold on to the project and just merge other people PR's in case one day he is interested in this again.
Assuming it is, it's a bit amusing to see so many people continue to miss the point. The market for Slack and HipChat is not organizations looking to work harder to maintain their own solutions that ultimately provide less to them.
I am all for using an open source alternative to Slack. But IRC is not it. What we need is a modern, open standard for persistent group chat ala Slack, with security features. I am not saying sit down and draft papers, writing code that can become a standard is fine. Maybe Mattermost is it, I don't know.
Obviously that post is a bit off-topic, but anyone following HN regularly likely inferred that this topic is in response to the recent "Slack vs. IRC" debate that's been going on.
