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> If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.

I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.

In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar.

You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?

IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place.

That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.



> I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.

With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer


Nothing stopping any client from having logs. mirc and xchat have had them for decades. Yes, they are local but do exist and serve their purpose


Sure. But when you first join there is no history which means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same questions because there was nothing they could search.


Exactly, and it won't search for stuff that was written when your client, or the bot, wasn't running.

Sure, you could set up bouncers and whatnot. But it's a barrier that Discord doesn't have.


You mean: is has history on the server?


Discord has history on the server, unlike IRC. This makes a huge difference when joining a new channel.


I know, I was correcting "Discord [...] has history in the client" from your comment.




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