I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us.
IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.
Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).
Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.
Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.
[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.
1-4) Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line).
5) Use PGP/GPG and email if you don't trust your IRC server. If you do, just use SSL. Since this is presumably an internal server, why wouldn't you trust it? There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
I don't know any Mac specific clients, not sure why you would want one.
> Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line).
Which doesn't resolve issue 1 (since the server is not available outside of 127.0.0.1 on the ssh host), or issue 3 since it can't see what happened when I was offline (though the bouncer idea is a good one, if fundamentally flawed in that it requires its own full time connection to the IRC server). My computer travels with me, and can not maintain a full time connection to the internet.
> There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
Why? Not everyone in the company needs access to client data. Why would I not want encryption options? The marketing folks don't need to know the internal hostnames of a client. The sales folks don't need a copy of customer chats while troubleshooting an issue.
> not sure why you would want one
Seems like a trip into OS holy war territory that I have no desire to get into.
You can only access this IRC server from the machine it is running on... but anyone in the company has highly priveleged access to it? But you can't run a client on the machine itself? And why would you be running a BNC locally? Who the hell set this system up, and do they run your mail system like this too?
There are so many PEBKACs here they are hard to count.
Regarding your addendum, I too have joined a channel to find everyone idling. Turns out, they get an alert when someone writes something, and all you have to do is ask your question. Almost invariably someone will pipe up.
They'll pipe up if the question is something like "What's the flag to make ls display in color?". IRCers are generally pretty quiet if you ask something actually technical or involving the code, or they'll just offer up a lot of speculation and irrelevant links. My theory is that the real project leaders and developers use mailing lists because they need to get work done, not watch IRC.
Definitely true. It can be really great if the main developers are actually using the IRC channel to coordinate development, but I think that can only really work when there aren't a ton of users to be poking in all the time. Kind of a Catch-22 problem; Linus would not be well-served to hang out on a Linux channel, because (as anyone who has seen his Google+ posts can testify) an army of sycophants would feel the need to interject their own non-content responses to everything he says. A small project, however, can still coordinate among developers while helping the odd user who shows up.
That's exactly what I did (I was aware enough of IRC ettiquite that people idle in the rooms but may come back sometime later & answer): ask a question and usually answer my own question and quit without a response some 4 hours later.
Which is better depends entirely on what the question is. Most questions asked on IRC have absolutely no business on a mailing list, and the ensuing discussions would render the mailing list unusable.
Nobody advocates abandoning email for IRC. Right tool for the job, like anything else in life.
IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.
Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).
Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.
Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.
[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.