[awj]

> ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend

Slack is way more than that, though.

My recollection is that even the initial version of Slack was more than that.

At this point, it's enough that "let's extend ircd" isn't exactly a practical answer. Either they maintain their own incompatible fork of ircd or they try to force their business desires into the irc protocol.

There's plenty of things that are "just X plus some paint" if you don't look at them deeply. That usually does an extreme disservice to the difficulty of the "plus some paint" part, and often represents a failure to understand the features involved.

[mr__y]

While you are obviously right, I still believe that the MVP one weekend project I described in parent post would still cover a large fraction of use-cases. You could then improve on that and add some "minor" (minor in the sense of dev-time) improvements like syntax highlighting using some free (as in beer) libs for that. I am not trying to imply that I could "clone" Slack over the weekend by putting together ircd+elastic and then adding some JS cruft on top of that. But I do imply that just that would be enough as an MVP and as something that would make usage of self-hosted IRC possible for a wider, non-technical audience. I also believe that this itself would cover the functionality actually used by many slack users (at least my personal anecdata from 8 smallish companies supports that) And I also can't stress this enough: I am not trying to say that Slack was created over the weekend or devalue a really impressive and massive effort they've put to get the scale, the functionality and the UX.

[wtetzner]

I don't use Slack, but I'm curious about which features make up the "more than that" part.

[awj]

Based on me augmenting my memory with searches of release notes at the time:

- Phone apps from the jump - Easy ability to upload files - Search includes the content of those files - Editing