Recently I did a twitter poll

that told me IRC sucks and Discord is the shit. It was a small poll mind you; only 8 voters. About a month ago I setup a discord server for my Twitch stream and IRL friends. BotB folks have slowly been joining.

IRC is still the official method of hanging out for BotB.

...but I'm still gonna invite you all to MY discord server that happens to have a battleofthebits channel. There are no current plans to move the BotB bot to discord; OHBs will still be IRC centric. And a reminder: this is MY discord server, not the community server, but it's the closest thing to an official BotB discord server.

https://discord.gg/4EnrPVK

[EDIT] :: here's MiDoRi's straw poll so we can all vote together as a big BotB family team peoples - http://www.strawpoll.me/11875077

and here's a conversation about privacy/ownership concerns between b00daw and ElHuesudoII from yesterday

B00daW - Today at 12:42 AM
not so sure
it has less features than some modern IRC clients; and includes tyrannical terms of service
it just includes avatars
well... and voice chat

EH2 - Today at 12:51 AM
as far as I saw, the TOS is pretty... regular?
or I don't know

B00daW - Today at 1:08 AM
they are able to have a license to and resell any original content you post in here
which i don't see how they can legally back that up

EH2 - Today at 1:16 AM
resell?
well from what I read it's the standard legalese for "please don't try to do crazy shit like sue us because you uploaded something here and it got distributed to a bunch of people on their apps"
also I wouldn't recommend anyone to upload something to any service that doesn't state that your private data is your private data anyway
just link it from a different service so that you can take it down whenever you want if you so desire

B00daW - Today at 1:44 AM
By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Data with the Services, you grant to us a nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use Your Data, subject to the Company’s Privacy Policy.

EH2 - Today at 9:20 AM
Yeah that's mainly what I meant above, the "don't sue us because we transfer your data to other users via our app", I've seen it in other services' TOS
The creepy thing is the "nonexclusive, transferable" and "sublicensable" part, that means they can let other people use the data
Though it could be API stuff
But yeah, if you link your content from other services that give you more control over data distribution then you're in the clear, you can easily have them removed and Discord will be left with broken links

irc 4 life

IRC is nice and accessible and Discord is a comfy app, what really sucks is stuff like Facebook and its crappy messaging system

tbh keep the #botb IRC, it's a nice place to hang out. It's best if you keep the hangout place in the same spot over the years. Moving to a different messaging system will end up fragmenting the community and making things a pain in the ass to manage.

Also these might be worth reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/441sy8/discords_problematic_your_data_licensing_clause/
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/3r3rrt/question_about_tos_clause_your_data/cwknfci/

You should decide for yourself whether you wanna trust the app (and any other services) based on this.

pls don't support these underhanded, trendfucking litigious scumbags at discord

[This n00b acted more than it was good to read. - ViL]

I am always 100% on Discord so if anyone wants to talk, I'll be on there not that anyone would want to voluntarily

Who uses Twitter?

sqwerty: Can you explain why you feel like that?

criticists gonna criticize!

i'm always on discord but i personally prefer IRC for text. +1 for not fragmenting the community but in the past our worries about that sort of thing have turned out to be baseless; escape velocity from the gravity well of #botb is nontrivial.

@Blaze Weednix
I'm against how any of these bigboyproprietary chat apps are obliged to handle their users' data. it's not even a tinfoilhat thing, it's a "if you're already using and understand you have access to quite relatively free platforms, why would you willingly offer yourself and your friends to this breed of unoriginal idiots making the same datamining applications over and over" thing.

skype, slack, discord, whatsie, kidk, etc(there are dozens) all want you to use their service so they can eagerly follow the current model of data sciencing up you and your network and selling it to advertisers and whatever other CleverIdeas they have going on. give them the middle finger and tell them to get a real job. stay on irc and maintain a mumble server lol, or better yet write your own client and share it with your buddies

@sqwerty: What I'm not quite sure about if this is a feeling you have only with chat apps or with services in general. I don't have any way to prove this but maybe Facebook and Google and some others would also sell your data to advertisers or stuff like that, yet their services are used by millions upon millions. I'm certainly not knowledgeable in these matters though.

My guess is that most people simply won't care about it and will go towards the alternative that's easier for them, not the one that's definitely the best choice. IRC is nice, but it doesn't offer all the stuff I can do on a Discord server (btw the term "server" as used by Discord is dumb), and maintaining my own Mumble server would imply keeping it up constantly (assuming it is being used all day), which is something I personally can't do, not sure about any other people.

When dealing with chat apps it's a lot more difficult because they're useless if your buddies don't use your fav one. I'd love to have a centralized place to talk to everyone from but instead I gotta deal with a huge mess because some people will just stay where they are. I feel I'm kinda straying away from the topic though so sorry if it comes off like that.

@charlotte
there are quite a lot of free mobile irc clients available for whatever os you're using. it can't be that all of them are a pain to use

@blaze weednix
I won't dispute the convenience factor cos it's undeniably more convenient to use skype or discord or something over arranging your own setup. if you're joining a service for that service's network, then that's also obviously something you're making a rational choice over since you have something to gain from it. my argument is, if your network is already well established on irc then trying to migrate to a place like discord would be both a shame and a downgrade imo. I agree with jangler tho, there's really nothing to worry about here, I'm just throwing my like, opinion man, out there

There's still some small setup you gotta do on those other apps depending on what you're doing but I get your point now. I agree migrating an established place like #botb is indeed not a good idea. It's kinda like moving your office to a new place but only tellling certain people lol.

I'm glad you think of and treat it like a puke7 place and not specifically a botb place. How I've been using it the whole time.

lol wtf that's shitty, so it's ios screwing things up and not the apps. this is the kinda thing that lines up with why avoiding apple isn't a bad idea, like seriously if you bought the device and can't even use it the way you want

[This n00b ashamed of what written. - BotB]

I don't get that recent tendency for some communities to migrate from IRC to discord. I really hope that IRC will always be the main and official BotB communication channel, since i'm not going to switch to anything else, and can't be bothered to use all those browser-based things (ugh, more JavaScript, there's not enough JavaScript, let's throw in some more JavaScript!!!).

@charlotte
That's what one gets for not using Android-based phone and client like AndChat, you can prevent the system from disconnecting the network even when OS goes to standby mode, and it doesn't even require root priviledges!
_{iProducts suck big time}

Anyway, IRC 4 LYFE, IRC ALL THE WAY
:3

EDIT: I fully agree with B00daw, discord's TOS sounds awful.

JavaScript?! did you say more JavaScript?!! omfg let's, oh shit I have an idea! let's make a new library, it'll be revolutionary! I'm so eager btw here's my idea for our Product aesthetic: http://www.toysrus.com/graphics/product_images/pTRU1-3023135enh-z6.jpg

Seriously dawg, why do people still use JavaScript

There's more than enough better languages

@charlotte
Not sure if you tried it, but there's an iOS version of ircCloud and _{(unless it's different from the web and android version)} it does keep you online and save messages for up to 2h if you disconnect without using /quit or something

IRC for android, as it is literally named is the best IRC client imo, the most customizable, clean and user-friendly to use i have tried over the bunch

Here is its feature list:
http://pastebin.com/raw/PGXsHmY6

And here is the latest apk, full version of course:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qv9icaeyixjqar2/com.countercultured.irc4android.201012801.apk?dl=1

Enjoy = )

Inb4 ViL gets haeit'd because warez :(

is not surprise; i always stated the utopia of having a fully-free internet where everyone can have fun without having to do anything system-related otherwise

why dont we set up a irc x discord bot that links both the chats so that people can use whatever they want?

IRC is still ideal.
even if I haven't been on in forever :Y

@RazerBlue6:
JS continues to exist because it's still the only client-side scripting language supported in browsers.
sure, you could do shit like code in another language and compile that into JS, but that's generally a pain in the ass

Nice idea actually, the bot could sit in the separate channel though, just in case someone don't want their messages forwarded outside.

also

ACHTUNG, ACHTUNG, UWAGA UWAGA, ATTENTION REQUIRED!
I thought we should make a poll here on BotB, to get more answers and better picture of what BotBrs actually think. http://www.strawpoll.me/11875077

Puke pls pin it to your post

EDIT: Dunno why, but apparently strawpoll has interpreted my apostrophes in weird way

EDIT 2: Couldn't find any JS-free poll service :(

It's currently 100% in favor of irc. Case closed

( It may currently only have one vote though...)

@MiDoRi I added your poll to my post

@RazerBlue6 actually, thanks to node, javascript is the bees knees right now in web software. I write and test this shit all day at work. I won't be surprised when the industry clings to something new in a few years, but for now I understand it's benefits even if it can break your brain getting it to do everything you want.

There has been talk of relaying between the two chats, but I have to say I hate that idea. There are some people who feel very strongly about not being on Discord and I totally get it. The community is going to splinter into different chat services no matter what anyone wants; it's a 2016 trend. If people want to join this new space they are more than welcome and if they hate it that's great too. Like I said this is my personal space, not an official BotB space; it's just an option. If I don't provide an option BotBrs will just find their own.

Ok who was the dong that voted for pigeon post 108 times

Oh... yeah what a dong that person is. Shouldn't he be spending his time doing something more... productive???? What a waste of time to manually vote for an option 108 times.

Anyway, that's pretty easy to figure out. Two theories are floating around concerning this; the first is that someone in this thread is worth 108 times his own weight (probably often chased by the police and fast food chains, what a glutton), and the other is that the answer is obtained through math.

Let's go for the second theory, we'll start from this: http://i.imgur.com/0GGzG9B.png

As you can see, there's 108 votes for pigeon post, and the percentage of votes for IRC (the serious answer with the most votes) totals 9% of all votes. If you divide 108 by 9 you get 12, which is a pretty familiar number...

...

TMM12, what do you have to say about this development? :):):):):):):):):):)

I do know that strawpoll tries to keep you from voting more than once on a poll. I'm not sure if it's IP based or cookie based. Obviously, though, every pineapple on pizza

poll has been tampered in this way.

Depends on what you set. Every poll I had seen so far was IP-based but this one's cookie-based, so it's a matter of starting a browser in private/incognito mode, voting, closing, and repeating. You can still rig it when it's IP-based but it's slower and a little more involved.

Also pineapple on pizza is best >:C

btw my serious answer is that I prefer Discord over IRC but both are good communication means.

Yeah, i've set it to be cookie-based, but i don't think any of these options is bulletproof anyway, since a person stubborn enough to troll a poll with IP-based prevention could have used proxies/TOR/whatever to bypass it. Yeah, cookie-based one seems to be easier to bypass tho.

@Blaze Weednix
Your name has 12 letters ;)

No it has 13 were you never taught how to count >:C

A space isn't a letter, it is a ... space

>:C

You won't get me next time.

13 characters for the win 🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕

are we counting the votes for pigeon post toward irc

no, pigeon post is literal
so it looks like i need to pick up another hobby :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue_UDHH-EzY

Wait wat, someone actually prefers discord over irc??

I don't know what discord is but I already hate it.

IRC Doesn't work on my WINDOWS PHONE but it does work on my WINDOWS KOMPUTER so I'm happy with IRC. I like the text only screen because it reminds me of YAHOO! CHAT.

So it's basically skype, but if it were designed primarily for multi-chat instead of one-on-one? + some silly/cutesy attitude and attempts to integrate with gaming and streaming platforms?

If people want a dedicated discord server,why not create one

Never got the discord web client to work properly in my browser (using linux, so no standalone app afaik). To me it just seems like another app that eats up too much RAM with fancy gamer-targeted graphics. (though I like the idea of it, just not the execution)

Also it isn't FLOSS so you risk getting in a katana & trenchcoat fight with Richard Stallman.

So I'm voting Remain! (even tough I never show up in IRC)

Regarding JavaScript debate: I'm still suprised BotB doesn't have a representation in Gopher protocol :D

Gopher BotB, for all your vintage-computing browsing needs

there is a linux desktop app for discord

It says "Coming soon" on the official website. Even when you select unstable builds o.o

you're right but nevertheless this is the one i use https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/discord-canary/

and now the discord guild is pretty much where almost all BOTB chat activity takes place

.... and Discord is even more of an invasive piece of spyware than how it was in 2016, and it's even more slower than ever.... and yet we rely on it because nobody cares about IRCv3 nor XMPP anymore.

Well some people care about Matrix but it's really memed upon in some places I'm on at the same time. Revolt exists i guess.

let's be honest; irc is not beginner friendly, especially when you factor in the conflicting clues from guis and the shoehorned-in account management. that's why it lost. people are willing to sacrifice practically anything else for convenience.

still, botb is in a unique position where the irc is still the "backend" for the chat, which makes it an ideal candidate for the one-server-one-chatroom alternatives.

unfortunately, the problem with software like matrix or revolt is that it's even slower and frailer than discord - i've heard nothing but moderation and auth nightmares about all of these open source alternatives.

i'm sure people wouldn't mind switching over if it was more convenient and stable, but unfortunately as things stand only big corpos provide that...

tbh I enjoy Discord because it allows for viewing multimedia directly on client and editing messages after you posted them, but the moment people abandon the Discord ship I'll abandon it with them.

I have heard the gripes about the open source alternatives, but I'm hopeful that they're temporary and that eventually they'll be a good option

I think we should keep the IRC chat. I switch between devices frequently, and since IRC is browser-based and I don't have Discord on my phone and other laptop, I use the IRC. So I think we should keep it as an alternative.

i also think we should keep both, and meanwhile keep an eye if something better can replace discord (just like mastodon and bluesky are replacing that obsolete "xitter")

i think it's also because of this vicious cycle going on: nobody invests nor cares on the alternatives because they think Discord is good enough, even though Discord is getting worse and worse; which means the alternatives are lackluster due to lack of developers and/or users.... which then means nobody invests on them, which means the alternatives are lackluster.

There's also the whole thing of even though some of the alternatives are lately getting closer to Discord's featureset, people still won't move due to how almost everyone built their homes on Discord, everyone is on Discord, all communities are there, etc.

The status quo is just hard to shake up, and the idea of having to actually find a separate server (or even set your own) is very intimidating for many people who are used to the convenience of a centralized platform.

Yeah, it might be worth a shot to look into some of these other options.

mfw i just revived a 2016 thread

erm mods that’s illegal

IRC is still there

me who only uses IRC: (irc is peak)

Back in 2016 when this thread was made, I was a huge advocate for Discord. Nowadays... well, not really. I don't like how centralized the internet has become.

The one thing I miss about IRC is that it was ephemeral. More often than not, I find some very unpleasant things I said on Discord all the way back in 2017. I know that's not who I am anymore, but it's still not pleasant.

At least with forums I'd have some time to cook up a reply or whatever, like I am doing here with this post, significantly lowering the chances I sound stupid (and instead can sound intellectually stupid lmao)

On the other hand, IRC doesn't really memorise anything, unless you keep the client open for a long period of time. This means anything stupid I say would pretty much be forgotten unless someone else archived it (like we did with IRC quotes back in the day), but also means important information *could* be lost if not archived carefully.

Discord is infinitely more convenient of course. It's got many features that IRC doesn't which helps immensely with organization and just ease of use, however with this convenience also come concessions. Lots of scammers, spammers, lots of random meaningless "features" that are excuses to keep yanking your money out of your wallet. I've personally just switched to using Discord in a browser and would like to not have to depend on it, but alas.

Switching to something else requires so much organization, and a lot of people to agree on one "platform", which therein repeats the exact issue many have with Discord. IRC had, and still has a big positive aspect of it being a documented standard that anyone can design a client for. Hey, if only someone could design a similar standard for modern messaging apps that actually gets adopted, that'd be great! ...It'll never happen, but hey, one can hope...!

discord--

at matc, discord is straight up banned. one of the csg (read: game dev) students somehow got the whole computer network infected with malware thru it and ever since then nobody can use it on the college wifi. should've banned it sooner due to the fact that it IS spyware but, hey, what are you gonna do :shrug:

hopefully, fediverse is the future

For anyone who doesn't know much about IRC:

IRC isn't just the webchat thing, most IRC users are using separate IRC clients. One of the nice things about separate IRC clients is that you can save server lists in a format that you can transfer between computers, theoretically for decades if you keep using the same IRC client for all that time (which many of us have).

IRC is, specifically, just a really old internet chat protocol. Came around before the World Wide Web project (you know, global internet) even got going. One of the major concerns about IRC these days is that it's the sort of security hole you could run a tractor through, but also most peoples' devices (networking equipment and computers) are fairly secure to all the ways to open up a network with IRC.

I want an XMPP bridge tho father vomit seven, when is the BotB XMPP Bridge Project launching? Wheeeeeeeen? =]

i struggle a lot on xmpp (ui from clients like Gajim are terribly demotivating, and etc.) - xmpp actually has a huge potential (but for now i can only see it's potential, nothing else..)

If you can drop an A4 triangle into FamiTracker, you can configure an IRC client. Take any “convenience” arguments to Battle of the Instagram.

Lmao i love this reply. Well said

Not entirely sure if it’s been mentioned already, but Revolt is also a solid discord alternative without the usual shenanigans. It’s got a lot of features that Discord makes you pay for, but it offers for free.
Only real issue is the lack of a mobile app yet.

https://revolt.chat/