> With a ZNC bounce, a simple ircd server and 5 minutes you can avoid paying for communication and keep your company chat logs secure and on your own infrastructure.
Having watched a coworker spend a solid week getting our company's ircd setup (and this was our VP of Engineering, mind you), I've gotta call BS here. Also, until I started using irccloud[1] a few months ago, I was using ZNC, and that's no walk in the park either.
Agree, ZNC is a crappy experience. The targeting seems wrong here -- if you wanted to pick one feature that developers need that casual IRC users don't, it's the ability to stay connected 24/7, because otherwise the chance of actually being online at the same time as someone who wants to talk about their project is low.
So I'd question the point of building a native client, given ZNC's shortcomings. What's so special about this client that you couldn't just run it as a web service using Node, rather than only making it available as a fat node-webkit client?
I can only assume your coworker had quite an elaborate setup, as most ircds (e.g., ircu, charybdis, ircd-hybrid) take an hour, tops, to configure and get running.
As a novice, it took several hours to wade through the configuration files when setting up an IRCd, and additional time to configure services daemons. I also continually run into issues with configuration decisions I made before using the daemon more actively.
While I could have relied on the defaults, I wouldn't trust my users' data with a default configuration. It would be irresponsible at best, and this is even more important to companies.
> Having watched a coworker spend a solid week getting our company's ircd setup (and this was our VP of Engineering, mind you), I've gotta call BS here.
I've gotta call BS on your story. Unless he was learning Unix from scratch, it shouldn't take more than a couple hours to setup an ircd.
Since a lot of people are saying it shouldn't have taken that long for your VP to set up an irc server (which I agree with), I'd like to argue a case I haven't seen made here. What were your specific needs? Was he setting the server up for just those needs, or what "might be needed"? Both a IRC server and ZNC do not take much to configure for basic needs.
When you start adding features you don't need but think are cool or may one day get used, setting up these things becomes a whole other thing. A IRC server with simple nick auth and chanserv I'm sure would've been enough. What else did your VP implement? A egg drop not? Some other features? There has to be more to this story then you've said.
Having watched a coworker spend a solid week getting our company's ircd setup (and this was our VP of Engineering, mind you), I've gotta call BS here. Also, until I started using irccloud[1] a few months ago, I was using ZNC, and that's no walk in the park either.
[1] https://www.irccloud.com/