>IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search
It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.
Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]
Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection.
The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments.
I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.
Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415