IRC channel

[balazsszekely]

@Joanna

I miss the old days in irc when many people were talking about pascal. Most people seem to have disappeared from there. Maybe they died of old age? I don’t know 

again? Please stop infesting the forum with posts about IRC, you already hijacked several threads. It should be pretty obvious by now that people don't want to participate in IRC discussions for various reasons. Why do you keep insisting?

PS: If you still want to talk about IRC, please start a separate thread next time.

[Thaddy]

What's wrong with current IRC?
OK, it is old school, but that does not matter.
@Joanna
Let's write a secure IRC chat. We don't need "The Donald" to start our own.
Getmem is atm not invited for dinner.

[Martin_fr]

This thread was split off https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,61276.msg461070.html#msg461070

The last thing we need to do is divide people up by age. I didn’t take the survey for that reason.

The important question is WHY did most schools stop teaching pascal ??and how to reverse this trend?

As if the lack of universities and employers supporting pascal isn’t enough, outside of this forum people are constantly attacking and trying to discredit pascal. It’s a rare thing to meet someone new who uses Pascal.

I miss the old days in irc when many people were talking about pascal. Most people seem to have disappeared from there. Maybe they died of old age? I don’t know 

A word of clarification
Personally, I deem the above post perfectly reasonable within the bounds of the original thread. However, the potential (and in my experience likely) subsequent discussion (picking on that single last line of the post) breaks those bounds

[balazsszekely]

Just to prove my point...
Please take a look at the following thread: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,60989.0.html and the seemingly innocent reply #7. Then watch how the whole thread degenerate mostly into a futile IRC discussion.

[KodeZwerg]

It was fun to read both threads 

[Martin_fr]

Just to prove my point...

It's exactly what I said => "in my experience likely".
Context: Looking at the post for this thread, just expressing a sentiment does not derail a thread. It requires answers (Oh and yes, they will come: "in my experience likely").

The sentiment was not entirely offtopic. Several people in the thread had made references to the past (when Pascal was taught, etc). So has IRC added to the popularity? Was there a different set of mind?
It also was only a minor part of the overall post.

Btw, we are derailing this thread now....

So for those who want to reply on IRC, let's go back to that.

[Joanna from IRC]

Hi sorry for causing so much trouble. 
I kind of think of pascal programming and chatting about it in irc to be one activity. Yes I understand that it’s possible to use pascal or irc independently of eachother but it’s hard not to notice that the use of both is discouraged outside of this forum.
I now believe that freenode was destroyed on purpose to get rid of irc usage. Around 45000 people were lost and never made it to Libera.
Libera is not freenode. A lot changed for the worse after the move. People moderating some of the popular channels were replaced by people who allow all sorts of things that they shouldn’t. I believe that some of Libera staff have been meddling  with how people operate their channels.

I apologize if my promotion of irc annoys some people but this is the only good source of pascal programmers that I know of and I have a fading hope that some who don’t know about irc would want to come talk there.

[alpine]

I apologize if my promotion of irc annoys some people but this is the only good source of pascal programmers that I know of and I have a fading hope that some who don’t know about irc would want to come talk there.

Apologies for my ignorant question, I'm not an IRC user, but what is the actual story? For me, technically there is no big difference between IRC channels and, e.g. Discord channels, but obliviously there is a big background behind this freenode/libera thing.
AFAIK an "Unofficial FreePascal" Discord server exists - can it be used for the same purpose?

[Bogen85]

AFAIK an "Unofficial FreePascal" Discord server exists - can it be used for the same purpose?

It exists, and the community there is fairly active, and lots of beginners to pascal come regularly and get help.

There are several long time pascal users there, and they are able to provide a lot of help to those that need it.

[Bogen85]

Apologies for my ignorant question, I'm not an IRC user, but what is the actual story? For me, technically there is no big difference between IRC channels and, e.g. Discord channels, but obliviously there is a big background behind this freenode/libera thing.

Some prefer a richer text environment, for sharing code snippets/examples without having to reply on other gist/paste sites. Being able to use markdown code formatting and go back and edit your code is beneficial to many.

[alpine]

Apologies for my ignorant question, I'm not an IRC user, but what is the actual story? For me, technically there is no big difference between IRC channels and, e.g. Discord channels, but obliviously there is a big background behind this freenode/libera thing.

Some prefer a richer text environment, for sharing code snippets/examples without having to reply on other gist/paste sites. Being able to use markdown code formatting and go back and edit your code is beneficial to many.

Yeah, that is probably another point in the favor of the Discord channels. As I said, I'm not an IRC user and don't know it's deficiencies.

[KodeZwerg]

Since an Image can tell more than a thousand words, I quickly made one to show you a little discord workflow.

[alpine]

Since an Image can tell more than a thousand words, I quickly made one to show you a little discord workflow.

Even more that the Discord is promoted as the "gamers choice" - I can recall how I got interested in the programming a long time ago - after wondering how the games I like to play were made actually.

[Joanna from IRC]

Hi y.ivanov
There are several major differences between Irc and other similar purpose social media platforms

0. Irc doesn’t require a phone number or email address in order to go there and talk. It’s up to the channel owners whether unregistered users can join a channel. it’s also possible for channel ops to waive registration requirements.

1. Irc lets you choose or create whatever client you want. Discord and others force you to use Their proprietary Spyware client Which collects and monetizes your data as a business model.

2. Irc gives the people who use it more control and can have a chance of a good user interface if you choose/create a good client. Discord has a horrible user interface and doesn’t resize very well. It was impossible to ignore people in discord last time I checked. It informs you everytime they talk.

3. Irc uses low bandwidth and has no voice chat photos and other nonsense. Discord uses a lot of computer resources and I’ve had it max our my cpu before.

4. Discord saves offline chats irc requires you to always be online or use a bouncer or other resources that record things you missed including channel logs.
I don’t see the point of never missing chatter in a chat channel it’s exhausting to try to catch up. it’s better to use forums for asynchronous communication they are much better organized.

5. Irc doesn’t have voice chat and people can’t show you photos you don’t want to see in the channel everything is done by links to share things like photos or text instead of cluttering channel with them.

IRC was the original chat platform long before all the others. There is nothing wrong with it at all as long as you have good people in your channel who are reasonably active.

[KodeZwerg]

0. Irc doesn’t require a phone number or email address in order to go there and talk. It’s up to the channel owners whether unregistered users can join a channel. it’s also possible for channel ops to waive registration requirements.

To avoid spam-bots/trolls on discord, I do like that things must have an unique ID.

1. Irc lets you choose or create whatever client you want. Discord and others force you to use Their proprietary Spyware client Which collects and monetizes your data as a business model.

You can use Discord client or whatever Webbrowser is installed on your system = a more easy way to getting started you can not have with whatever your device is.

2. Irc gives the people who use it more control and can have a chance of a good user interface if you choose/create a good client. Discord has a horrible user interface and doesn’t resize very well. It was impossible to ignore people in discord last time I checked. It informs you everytime they talk.

Since I never had that issue (i can very easy mute persons or whole "channels")

3. Irc uses low bandwidth and has no voice chat photos and other nonsense. Discord uses a lot of computer resources and I’ve had it max our my cpu before.

Bandwidth depend on how many servers you joined and if you let them auto-update or like i, servers do nothing until i tell.
Max CPU?? I assume you was using some alpha kind of client.

4. Discord saves offline chats irc requires you to always be online or use a bouncer or other resources that record things you missed including channel logs.
I don’t see the point of never missing chatter in a chat channel it’s exhausting to try to catch up. it’s better to use forums for asynchronous communication they are much better organized.

Discord helps me to save energy, I do not need 24/7 to have something running to really get "all" messages and what I read or skip depend on me.
Last time I checked IRC/bouncers, it told me something like "you need to be registered for at least XX month...."

5. Irc doesn’t have voice chat and people can’t show you photos you don’t want to see in the channel everything is done by links to share things like photos or text instead of cluttering channel with them.

(De)-Activate image support is done by one easy setting, what I try to say is, when you hate multimedia and want to save bandwidth, just turn it off 
The possibility to quick share some image/video or going into a voice chat I do never want to miss again.

Why I use Discord and not IRC? Watch above image and you understand. Feel free to attach a screenshot of IRC to have something we can compare.
Anyway, this should not be a discussion about what is better or worse, both have their right in existence.