[bphogan]

Disagree about barrier to entry.

I run an office hours chat for my online classes powered by IRC. I use KiwiIRC as the front-end.

Students need only the web address of the web page I want them to go to. When they get there, they need only a username.

No signup, no verification, none of that. They're online, getting help in seconds.

Individual public channels requiring nickserv registration and all that? that's another story.

But seriously - the barrier to entry to get started is this:

https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/?##irc_can_be_ea...

[rspeer]

> cherryh.freenode.net set mode +ns ##irc_can_be_easy

Some welcome message. You may be too used to IRC to recognize this, but this is frightening gibberish to 99.99% of computer users.

Also, this interface does not get you crucial features provided by other chat services, such as seeing what previous users have said.

[bphogan]

IRC is an open protocol. Messages like what you see can be hidden by the client or suppressed by the server. And free intermediary servers can keep logs.

It's amazing to me how people think Slack is this amazing tool. If someone had thrown millions of dollars at IRC, it wouldn't suck.

But instead, you'll fork over your personal info and insist I do too.