The IRC protocol might not be pretty, but what protocol is? HTTP? AMQP? XMPP? Protocols are not meant to be pretty, just efficient and robust enough to support the desired feature set. It's a shame that none of Slack, Hipchat, now Mattermost support IRC. They're all just IRC clones, drawing on the same ideas, just giving you a crappy (but pretty!) web interface.
Slack "supports" IRC in that you can allow IRC connections, and then people can connect to your Slack instance via IRC. This might also be the case for some of the alternatives.
And it's a pain in the neck! It means that some of the participants in the channel are not able to read what's happened while they were away. Some of them get encoding errors. The IRC people do not get the same graphical elements as everybody else. They can't use custom /-commands.
In conclusion, in order to communicate the most effectively, you have to know who's on IRC and think about the differences in user experience for these people versus everybody else.
IRC has weaknesses (namely lack of centralized logging and unspecified text encoding) and fixing these weaknesses means forgoing support for existing IRC clients.
> And it's a pain in the neck! It means that some of the participants in the channel are not able to read what's happened while they were away. Some of them get encoding errors.
Everyone I've ever worked with who uses IRC has a client or bouncer running somewhere that never disconnects and assumes UTF-8, so neither of these are realistic problems.
I also assumed Mattermost supported IRC, without even checking. It's a bit disappointing that it doesn't, but I wonder how easy it'd be to add support for IRC in Mattermost, given that we have the source code?
