Are you fucking kidding me? I've been using IRC since I was 10. If a 10-year-old can figure it out, I think a professional engineer can figure it out. Using your typical IRC client to join a channel is just 4 steps:
1. Download IRC client.
2. Pick a nickname.
3. Pick a server.
4. Join a channel.
With something like kiwiirc, you can even omit steps 1, 3, and 4: you can give someone a URL to a particular channel on a particular server. Just pick a nickname and click "join". It's really simple.
> anyone in any kind of role (senior to junior, technical to non-technical)
I'm talking about Joe Frontend, Billy Design Intern, Gary Office Assistant. Maybe you work on teams that are 100% neckbeards that aren't afraid to crack open an RFC to get daily shit done (and waste huge amounts of company resources on things that should be simple), but that's not the environment I'm talking about.
Not accounting for these people is the fatal mistake made by far too much of the tools and processes in software. I've watched people go into shops like this as non-technical helpers, work really hard and skillfully within the boundaries of their role, but get burned too many times by a hoity-toity technical bro "lol, you can't even open an ssh tunnel to the bastion host to connect to the internal IRC..." that they quit software, return to lower paid job they did during school and decide they have no skills, when they would thrive on a more balanced (and more socially skilled) team.
I've never needed to open an SSH tunnel to connect to IRC. I click on the Xchat icon, and two seconds later I'm connected. I don't know where you're getting these ideas that using IRC requires consulting the RFC or opening SSH tunnels, because you don't need to do either of those things.
There's two ways this argument goes awry: "IRC is fine, you just have to be smart enough" and "Only ever use IRC for the things it does well", I thought we were on the other branch there for a bit.
I had specifically included a scenario that is both common for use in my experience, and also pretty much impossible for a normal human using IRC in order to preempt this branch:
> Follow the directions to set it up so changes on this Trello board are posted to #channel
Sure, in extremely limited situations (so many qualifications are required here I won't list them) it's mostly easy enough for a non-technical person to manage.
Normal people (that is, people who value their own time and haven't been warped by daily interaction with software that fails to do what you asked because you failed to include some extremely implicit punctuation) laugh at many common explanations surrounding IRC, just a handful of examples: "IRC doesn't have passwords really so to prove who you are, you have to speak specific commands, like a CLI, at this bot over here, or configure your client to do that for you" "IRC has away status but nobody really uses it, because it's manual in many clients, so you typically 'ping' people and just wait to hear back if they are around" "oh yeah, if you want to get rid of all the join/part/away spam, the option for that is hidden in a menu with a bunch of other stuff, and in this client you have to set it up for each channel separately" "oh, yeah, you can't speak in that channel because you have to get the bot to +v you by direct messaging it 'shibboleth'" "btw here's the list of random-seeming letter 'flags' our server supports and how it interprets what they mean differently from other IRC daemons"
And we haven't even talked about how bad the story is around message persistence or using multiple clients or the "solution": bouncers. Getting all that going is basically a non-starter for humans unless you give in and use a service like IRCCloud that deals with search and synchronization well across platforms (but which you must be aware of in the first place).
I'm pretty technical, I've internalised the arcane knowledge, I've written IRC RFC-compliant bots to get things done (and then made them conform with common out-of RFC conventions in order to work with non-conforming IRCds), but that was all in high school, well before I gained a sense for the value of my own time. I can do it but I still refuse (to the degree that a team's use of IRC would make me pass on an offer as would I pass on a developer interviewee's inability to perceive usability problems with IRC).
Those are all good points (hell, I've been using IRC for nearly 17 years and I still don't know what half those flags mean). I think it's the first time I've seen a good argument about not using IRC!
I still think it'd be fairly easy to set up a company-internal server and make the whole process pretty streamlined for users. The only somewhat difficult part, then, would be the password. And I'm not sure how valuable message persistence really is, anyway, especially when you have your company email directory (and you could have IRC logs).
And for the record, I don't claim IRC's UX is without it's problems. It could certainly be improved a lot. I just don't think it's bad enough that people can't be expected to figure out how to log on and start chatting. At the same time, I think switching to a proprietary service that's run offsite is not a good solution. (We use XMPP where I work, but strangely not with conferencing. It works very well, but we're forced to use a shitty client (Cisco Jabber)). I've got high hopes that IRCv3 can start making improvements on a lot of the things you mentioned, but only time will tell.
Yeah, we tried that. You forgot setting up TLS, authentication, and oh you wanted a backlog? You'll have to switch to this different client that runs in the cloud / on a Linux server.
If there were no other alternatives we could probably manage somehow, but there's much less friction in "here's the URL, sign up with your email address"
Actually I know several IRC channels that have bots that send messages for activity on GitHub, Twitter, etc. And writing IRC bots is among the easiest things ever. The IRC protocol isn't hard and there are lots of libraries, snippets and bots out there.
