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Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled

Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service?

Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers.

"Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it with Qt (old Qt). Cool huh?




IRC is better than you're suggesting:

* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.

* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.

Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.


> Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.

It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.

I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.

Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".

More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.


Agree 100%. Almost every Jira complaint I see is a byproduct of the way our company centrally manages and locks it down. Things like custom fields and workflows require submitting a ticket and waiting a few weeks. That said, it can still be customized and made to work well for most internal teams.


> DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection

since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)

Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack


I'll admit I haven't been on IRC in 20 years, but while I remember fiddling with active/passive FTP settings and port forwarding every week at the very least, I do not remember any times where I had similar issues on IRC (using mIRC and later various Linux IRC clients, mostly Xchat and BitchX) in the 1890's. I don't know how it would have worked though, thinking about it.

(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)


When using DCC send in passive mode the sender listens on a local port (59 by default) and sends the receiver a CTCP message (an IRC protocol PRIVMSG message wrapped in \x01) containing their IP address in integer format and the port number. If the receiver accepts their client connects to the sender's open socket and the file is immediately dumped through the connection.

In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.

mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?


Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?


If the connection is already established, sure. How did you establish it though? There are ways to hook clients up that are both NAT’d, (STUN, etc) but DCC doesn’t use any of them.


You did a handshake to the NAT server, which passed it on to the destination behind the firewall?

I'm more a Unix person that a network person so it's possible I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is. Thanks for replying.


Jira is too flexible so the right way to do things is never apparent.


I would literally and unironically prefer to run a company on mIRC/corporate IRC servers and Bugzilla than Slack and Jira.


Does anyone actually have data on which company is run with what.

Herding exists, but at some point I suspect the fact that more working business use the one rather than the other would have some meaning.

That being said, the good thing about mIRC / Bugzilla is that no-one prevents you from using them for your business, so go for it !


>no-one prevents you from using them for your business

People who complain about these products probably aren't in the position to use something else, or they probably would have switched already.


I agree.

I use IRC all the time, and IRCCloud makes it comparable to Slack.


+1


You could have a point with Slack but Jira is really terrible. I used it for a customer years ago and I'm so happy any other customer is using something simpler. Jira could be OK if operated by a specialized team paid to do project management and to shield developers from the complications of the tool. It's not only the design, it's the sheer amount of functionality. We don't need all of that.

I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.


Every single one of my clients uses Jira, and nobody I've ever met had a problem with it. It works, it's flexible, it's pretty easy to use. It's the industry standard, and for good reason, as far as I can tell.


Meet me.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying

> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."

! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.

I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.


Not that it really matters much, but a lot of the design issues you're highlighting are due to the age of the software and Atlassian's seeming commitment to not breaking backward compatibility. In particular, Jira predates Markdown, so the software adopted the text formatter of the day, which was textile[0]. This is where the `bq.` syntax comes from. Jira didn't invent it from whole cloth -- it was adopted because that was the standard of the day. Likewise, it predates StackOverflow by a good 7 years. Some of the JavaScript used is old enough to be a college freshman.

As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.

[0] -- https://textile-lang.com/


That's a helpful comment. Nevertheless

bq. commitment to not breaking backward compatibility

Backward compatibility with what? People's brains? We're talking about markup language and rendering right, which is not an API consumed by machines.

bq. it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers.

So why is the new "Visual Mode" WYSIWYG text entry mode so terrible? And why that absurd "link" icon in the top right of the text entry widget?


Backwards-compatible with people's brains is one aspect of it, sure. No one likes a constantly evolving UI that shuffles things around. But, also backwards-compatible with already entered issues. I wholeheartedly agree they should support Markdown, but I don't think they can just dump Textile in the process either, since it'd affect a load of already entered issues.

As for the link issue, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I have an icon that looks like the Android "share" icon and that drops down a dialog with a link to the current page and a target user field. The link icon in the text entry field just adds a textile formatted link. I'm probably just overlooking something, but I'm not seeing what you described. And I never use the visual editor, so I can't speak to its quality.

I should note that I don't work for Atlassian and never have, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I have been using Jira since maybe 2004 due to its early adoption by the Apache Software Foundation. Jira is hardly perfect, but it's the least bad issue tracker I've used. At some level, I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. E.g., I know plenty of people that laud the GitHub issue tracker and I don't get it. It works well enough for small projects, but is too limiting for any project of non-trivial size, IMHO. I also find more than 2 or 3 labels in the issue list to just be a distracting sea of colors.

I hope you're able to find something that works well for you. I'll add that if you're using an on-premise version of Jira in your company, there's a high likelihood that you're running a dated release. I've found that some of the more aggravating issues people run into have actually been fixed, but not deployed in their environment. If you can find access to a running instance of the latest version, you might find it to be a more less frustrating experience.


I've never heard anyone call Jira the industry standard. There's way too much fragmentation in that market for anyone to be able to make that claim.

Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.


It looks like the industry standard from where I'm sitting. Of all the companies I've worked for in the past 15 years, both as employee and as freelancer, I think only 2 didn't use Jira. 3 if I count my private projects (I used Pivotal).

In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.


I'll see your anecdotal experience and raise you mine: in 9 years I've only worked with one company that did use Jira.


as a user (I do QA testing) I use JIRA every day and I really like it compared to other bug trackers I've used


Slack has resources!




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