Slack Is Shutting Down Its IRC Gateway (slack.help) 89
Slack, a team collaboration communication service, has updated its IRC support page to note that it is ending support for IRC on its platform: Unfortunately, support for gateways is ending. Starting on May 15th, it will no longer be possible to connect to Slack using the IRC and XMPP gateways. In another support page, which requires you to log in to one of your Slack groups, the company elaborates: As Slack has evolved over the years, we've built features and capabilities -- like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) -- that the IRC and XMPP gateways aren't able to handle. Our priority is to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has come to close the gateways.
Please note that the gateways will be closed according to the following schedule: March 6, 2018: No longer available to newly-created workspaces; April 3, 2018: Removed from workspaces where they're not in use; May 15, 2018: Closed for all remaining workspaces.
Please note that the gateways will be closed according to the following schedule: March 6, 2018: No longer available to newly-created workspaces; April 3, 2018: Removed from workspaces where they're not in use; May 15, 2018: Closed for all remaining workspaces.
It's one of the criteria my company used... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole IRC and XMPP compatibility of Slack was used as an argument to placate the old timers at my company.
Mostly I've found that people waste too much time making custom emoji and spend too little time working out real business due to the security and retention policies inherent in the Slack services.
Hopefully this can trigger some businesses to walk away from this seemingly useless tool.
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IRC, XMPP (depending on the server), nntp, etc could be set up quite quickly and easily if you didn't need federating support.
What IRC server software handles persistence and attachments? And how big of a virtual machine is needed to run it?
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What IRC server software handles persistence
Most bouncers like ZNC.
and attachments?
Client-side thing. DCC if you want. Pastebin otherwise. IMHO nothing that should be proper part of IRC.
And how big of a virtual machine is needed to run it?
It has to be at least this |-----------------| big.
Integrating IRC, bouncer, and pastebin (Score:2)
Most bouncers like ZNC.
Which IRC client integrates seamlessly with a bouncer, such that scrolling to the top of the scrollback automatically requests past messages from the bouncer and integrates them into the scrollback?
Client-side thing. DCC if you want.
Good luck reliably DCCing from one NAT to another, especially for users behind an ISP that applies carrier grade NAT to all home subscribers. And good luck DCCing when the user who sent the file is offline. To make that work, you'd end up having to integrate DCC into the bouncer, turning it into a pastebin. About
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Which IRC client integrates seamlessly with a bouncer
Pretty much any client
such that scrolling to the top of the scrollback automatically requests past messages from the bouncer and integrates them into the scrollback?
Any why would you want this oddly specific and useless mechanism? Why does the scrollback have to be requested on demand?
Sounds like you're also a friend of infinite scrolling on the web.
Good luck reliably DCCing from one NAT to another, especially for users behind an ISP that applies carrier grade NAT to all home subscribers. And good luck DCCing when the user who sent the file is offline.
Yes, nice to see you know basic networking. Anyway, you asked for an option, I told you two. This doesn't mean it's an exhaustive list.
Which IRC client for each of the five major operating systems (X11/Linux, Android, Windows, macOS, and iOS) has a decent pastebin client?
An IRC client having a pastebin client? Why do I get the impression I'm talking to a Windows user here...
In the same way that GNU, Apache or NGINX, MySQL or PostgreSQL, and PHP or Python aren't part of Linux proper, which is a kernel. Distributions combine them. So which distribution of IRC server, bouncer, and pastebin server is any good?
Apples and Oranges, IRC is not software, it's specification
Others on my team use Windows (Score:2)
such that scrolling to the top of the scrollback automatically requests past messages from the bouncer and integrates them into the scrollback?
Any why would you want this oddly specific and useless mechanism? Why does the scrollback have to be requested on demand?
Because people accustomed to Slack, Skype, or Discord demand the ability of a proposed replacement therefor to review and search chat history. It's likely that you have some model to review and search chat history in mind that you find superior to infinite scrolling; what is it?
An IRC client having a pastebin client? Why do I get the impression I'm talking to a Windows user here...
You're talking not to a user of Windows but instead to a user who collaborates with other team members who use Windows and tries to convince said team members to switch from Slack, Skype, or Discord to a combination of some IRC serve
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review and search chat history.
The usual way is that the bouncer keeps track of the chat history per channel and synthesizes a configurable amount (last 1k messages, all messages this month, whatever) of PRIVMSGs.
You're talking not to a user of Windows but instead to a user who collaborates with other team members who use Windows and tries to convince said team members to switch from Slack, Skype, or Discord to a combination of some IRC server and client, a bouncer, and a pastebin. They are accustomed to a user experience that integrates IRC, bouncer, and pastebin.
Seems like a hopeless battle, especially if those users are non-technical people.
But what is the specification for client to bouncer communication for the actions of reviewing and searching chat history? And what is the specification for client to pastebin communication? Among SFTP, FTPS, and WebDAV over HTTPS, which is preferred?
Yes, IRC is underspecified. Or to answer the actual questions, I don't care. I don't need client to pastebin communication (and if I needed it it would be one command alias away), I don't use a bouncer either. Also I never intended to propose a r
Re:It's one of the criteria my company used... (Score:4, Insightful)
Another garden being walled off.
I've been pushing for a return to mailing lists (listserv-type applications like Mailman, etc.) because of garbage like this. They ain't as fancy but the bells and whistles that Slack/Hipchat/etc. bring aren't really all that useful, are they? Emojis? Who gives a crap? You can't figure out what ":^)" or ":^(" means? Really?
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I've been pushing for a return to mailing lists (listserv-type applications like Mailman, etc.)
An internally hosted NNTP server would work better than a mailing list.
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Add a short course to teach the lusers to not top-post but only quote what they're reacting to, and to use built-in features like setting in-reply-to: headers, and you can have an actual discussion. Well, somewhere after they (re)learn to spell, to use proper grammar, and to put a little effort in composing text and expressing thoughts, that is.
You know what bugs me? How we keep on re-inventing things without bothering to make them work with the existing things. Like how "webforums" aren't built on NNTP, th
Re: It's one of the criteria my company used... (Score:2)
There is no good email or nntp client anymore, so everyone moved to web applications.
Blame Mozilla for fucking up and bloating their client with useless features that make it slow and unusable whenever you have 100k+ emails.
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ideal would be 30 days retention on site. and less than 1 day retention on Slack's servers outside of our company.
It made Slack to be useless for discussing any sensitive issues about future projects or customers. Which is perhaps 50% of the day to day work at my company.
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Here's a little thing I've observed ... the incidence of emojis is inversely proportional to that tool being useful for business purposes. If you can make custom emoji, then it truly is useless shit.
This endless social media and pandering to idiots who need more and more emojis and kittens makes me want to smack people in the head with an bat.
A few years back I was at a place which was deploying a piece of software for content management
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Fucking emojis and other crap is reducing software to the reward system for a 3 year old.
That's precisely what emoji have become, a short term gratification. Especially animated emoji. I suspect it stimulates the same parts of the brain that video slot machines are designed to trigger.
Feature not a bug (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, most of us consider lack of emoji support a feature not a bug.
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Yeah, most of us consider lack of emoji support a feature not a bug.
Most half way modern IRC and XMPP clients support emojis (presuming you're running in a half way modern terminal) since they support UTF-8 and that has emojis.
They seem to be talking about emoji-reactions which are presumably a layer on top of that. I have no ide what those are; they do not sound good.
TLDR; (Score:4, Insightful)
We want to support more superfluous shiny garbage and supporting IRC might remind people they don't need this bullshit.
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Might also remind them that Slack owns what you send them.
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Thats the point of the gateway.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They are shutting down the gateway because their system is more advanced than IRC and other XMPP clients? The entire point of the gateway is to allow two disparate systems to work with each other, even with limited features.
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They are shooting down the gateway because it colides with their business case ("locking people into our shit")...
While this doesn't bother me.... (Score:2)
I'm more concerned about the trend to https-only on the internet. Eventually the only ports open will be 53 and 443. At that point, the internet will be silo'd into a consumer-only model just like cable TV. I think you can imagine what will happen past that.
Re: While this doesn't bother me....o (Score:1)
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The http-01 challenge needs to be able to connect to your server from random locations on the Internet. This is unacceptable for many servers internal to an organization. And the dns-01 challenge is a lot harder to automate, especially if your domains happen to currently be registered with a registrar whose bundled DNS zone hosting doesn't have an API that Dehydrated can use.
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I've got some potentially life-changing news for you: you don't need to use your registrar's bundled DNS.
Apart from Cloudflare, with which "other free options out there" for name hosting do readers have experience?
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Yes because otherwise you are allowing the guy who p0wned your users' cable modem to inject code into their browser.
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I'm in the same boat. I run limited bandwidth (read satellite) links out to a couple of remote sites that have no other option for connectivity. The advent of HTTPS everywhere has hurt the system performance dramatically. It used to be that my WAAS (or before that, squid proxy) could do a fantastic job of caching content locally, especially things like facebook. In tight knit communities, there's far more shared content than you'd think. Anyhow, now about 60% of the traffic is https, which I can do nothing
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All of this so that people can encrypt their cat videos and other frivolous things that don't need it.
They do need it. The government(s) seemed intent on everything everybody was looking at all the time. Even cute cat videos need encryption because it's none of the government's fucking business if I'm watching them.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Informative)
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In other news, operating systems developed nearly exclusively over IRC and mailing lists have taken over everything but desktops and phones, with the latter mostly using components (such as kernel) developed this way as well.
I don't care what means of communication millenials use, software written by them rarely keeps being maintained for as long as six months anyway. Then, they switch to yet another video-over-twitter-over-facebook thingy while making another node.js framework that won't last.
In unrelated
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Dont lump all of us millenials together.
I am labeled that and cannot stand Slack, Discord, modern design paradigms, webapps, Facebook, snapchat, or the like. I have a cell phone that does SMS and MMS. All my friends have phones.
Hell, I give 1 star reviews to Android apps that use Material Design 9 times outta 10.
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Dont lump all of us millenials together.
Apologies! Age doesn't imply wisdom.
I give 1 star reviews to Android apps that use Material Design 9 times outta 10.
Hell yeah, it's not just old folks that agree these UI designs are objectively worse [nngroup.com]. But hey, if you say CSD is worse than Hitler, you have a beer on me (collectable only in person).
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In unrelated news, on 2017-11-20 I was first told I have a grey hair in my beard, at age of 39 years 7 months.
Baby's first gray hair.
Millennials think youth ends at age 40. But Gen X and Boomers draw the the line at age 35 or less. So be thankful and feel young thanks to millennials.
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Baby's first gray hair.
What do you mean, there are people here older than me?!? Perhaps even ones wiser than me.
At least I have the comfort of being sure here's no one with better looks than me.
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What do you mean, there are people here older than me?!?
I'll always be your superior by 2 years. Well unless I die .. .
Perhaps even ones wiser than me.
I wouldn't know about that. ;-)
Is it still a resource hog? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the big reasons to use the gateway was simple - the web client, the node.js "app" and all that were resource hogs. Probably one of the few chat things that needs an i7 with 32GB of RAM just to use it.
Had one project where I was forced to use it, and was so dismayed when it seemed to consume half of one processor core and a ton of RAM. OF course, the IRC client takes 0% most of the time and barely any memory at all
It doesn't have to be this way, since Discord offers similar features, and yet happily consumes barely any processor and memory.
Since when do Electron apps not hog RAM. (Score:5, Informative)
Discord offers similar features, and yet happily consumes barely any processor and memory.
Since when? Discord's downloadable client is an Electron application, and last time I tried it (on Debian), its three Chromium processes combined took 365 MB. Skype's downloadable client for Linux also uses Electron and also takes hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
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365 MB
Like he said, barely any RAM.
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365 MB
Like he said, barely any RAM.
I disagree that 365 MB is "barely any RAM" when Dell.com is still selling new laptops with only 2 GB of RAM.
I just wonder.... (Score:3)
crap (Score:3)
crap crap crapity crap.
Dang slack app is a wretched reeking steaming pile. Getting stuck with slack has been tolerable with the XMPP gateway. Bleah.
I want information density. Text, that I can relegate to one side of the screen. Not a whole page taken up with pretty-pretty whitespace and formatting diddlypoo.
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Getting stuck with slack has been tolerable with the XMPP gateway.
I found that using the XMPP gateway would effectively lock up my client for minutes at a time whenever it reconnected. But it worked fine after it finally managed to connect. I ended up switching to the IRC gateway to avoid the connection issues.
Riot (Score:1)
Come on over to Riot.im or any other Matrix server. They love bridges, more all the time! Plus, it's federated and supports encryption.
the worst features (Score:1)
on the other hand, those assholes on irc that try to do lame slack shit just look stupid, millenial, and well, just fucking stupid.
Slack Mismanagement (Score:3)
Self-Host. Problem solved. (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate the idea of letting some third party proprietary host (like Slack) decide how and when it should work for me, though.
Personally, I'm running a Rocket.Chat [rocket.chat] instance - very Slack-like (and "Slack-compatible" if you have any bots you've developed for Slack's API that you want to use). Mattermost [mattermost.com] is another, similar option.
Time to go long Micron... (Score:2)
... since everyone will need to double their system's memory to send their co-workers a morning "Yo."
Can't let in the competition (Score:2)
Slack is basically just expensive IRC with a web client after all >:)
Don't panic, check out: wee-slack (Score:2)
Open standards vs proprietary services (Score:2)
This is on par with the general move of the internet towards walled gardens. From independent websites and blogs with RSS feeds for updates to Facebook/Twitter to abandoning the web itself in favor of apps. Also, every once in a while you'll see an article in the business/tech press bemoaning the existence of email when there are so many wonderful proprietary alternatives.
If XMPP had become as widespread as POP/SMTP/IMAP, we would've been able to chat as easily we can send an email, using any combination of