I believe SEN needs an IRC channel. Not just because it's awesome, but also because there is some functionality that IRC provides while the shoutbox does not.

1. IRC is instant, and does not glitch like the shoutbox.
2. IRC chat does not take up SEN's storage space.
3. IRC moderation is easy, and bots can be present in the IRC channel while the shoutbox must be actively moderated for flooding.
4. A link to the IRC channel can be conveniently placed on the main page.
5. Users do not have to register to use the IRC channel.

I propose using #SEN on quakenet, for the following reasons:
-It has a web client with a hardlink to the channel.
-#teamliquid is on quakenet as well.
-NickServ

Would anyone like to support this?

I'm completely willing to give it a shot.

[Edit]I gave it a shot and I like it. It doesn't need to be official, as long as a decent amount of users use it I'll be happy.

We have tried this before, and I honestly don't see the need for an IRC channel. Who would use it? Between the shoutbox and personal IM conversations, it just seems a little unneeded.

Honestly, I think all we need are a few performance upgrades to the shoutbox. I'm happy with it as it is, but it would be nice if autorefresh worked better.

Indeed; autorefresh has a lot of glitching atm such as it being periodic instead of real-time, disabling input when refreshing, failing to display some messages or displaying some messages multiple times, etc. Dev should probably fix it some time soon, lol.

Alternatively, we can just embed an IRC client in place of the shoutbox if needed.

Seems a lot easier then

I would think, then again i don't know about things in that field.

If it's possible to embed IRC, customize how it looks, lock it to a SEN channel, allow varied moderation from SEN, and have it not lower SEN performance, then I'm all for it.

They're all viable, but I'm not quite sure about the performance part. While it's not a load on SEN's servers, the end-user may get longer page load times due to the embedded client. The load time difference would be similar to the difference between

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/

and

http://www.teamliquid.net/irc/

... Walked in as MiniMoose2707 and called everyone Gay.

So like how about the nicknames. If we can create any nickname at anytime then theirs no point. Well almost.

Edit: I got kicked from some time out issue and my name stayed on, i get back in as ModZombie and everyone changes their nickname to some variation of my name to make lulz. I'll support if we have forced nicknames. If nicknames are allowed to run rampart. Their is no point.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 3 2010, 12:34 am by MadZombie.

If it NEEDS Java to run, I'm against it.

How many people here even really uses IRC?

IRC is for old people. No one who was born in the last 20 years has any reason to use IRC. At all.

I hate java too. I don't even have it installed.

Very few I should think.

IRC sucks. Definitely no.

These.

I think that if we can fix the Shoutbox, then IRC becomes wholly unnecessary. And regarding that,

All AJAX is periodic instead of real-time. Google, Facebook, all of it.

Ignoring the possibility of some Aristocrat-exclusive bug, you can still type. You just can't send. This could be fixed by simply optimizing the refresh function and making it faster, thereby making the problem less annoying.

I'll admit, this bug is a major pain in the ass. When it happens to me, it takes the form of me sending a shout in one tab, switching to a different tab, refreshing the shoutbox on that tab, and my shout doesn't appear there. Not sure how missing messages would be fixed, but duplicate messages could be stopped with additional verification on the client-side. (That would require sending the shouts back to the JS in a manner that includes each shout's ID and that can be parsed back into an array -- but that may actually be less taxing on the server, as it would shift the burden of serializing the shouts into HTML from the server to the client.)

There's also the problem of autorefresh in Shoutbox Main not pushing older entries off the page, causing it to steadily accumulate entries and eat RAM limitlessly. Not sure if that's been fixed yet. Not willing to test it and find out.

Not only do we have a shoutbox, but we have a Battle.Net

I need someone to explain to me why people still insist on using that decrepit old protocol. Is there some notable advantage to IRC that running an AJAX-based HTTP chat doesn't have?

Edit: Especially now that we have stuff like this around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pubsubhubbub

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 3 2010, 6:29 am by Tuxedo-Templar.

Because all the 1337 pr0 h4x0r5 use IRC. DUH.

If SEN gets an IRC, I won't be using it. The AJAX chat can't be that hard to fix and it's not exactly un-usable right now.

Sexy things can be done with mirc scripting. Ah the good ol days...
However, I do not have the time for such adventures. As far as a shoutbox upgrade, yeah, it's definitely needed.

How hard would it be to implement things such as /f a, /f l, and perhaps a way to open up a private IM conversation with one other person?

They'd have to implement a whole Friends system within a mod that probably wasn't created by them.

As far as I know, the entire chatbox was coded from scratch, and Dev has coded numerous mods for it already.