Beyond the backlog support, it's the addressing of the backlog.
Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very relevant.
Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of backlogging.
"Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable"
Discord's search function is 1,000x better than what's built into Windows 10 and 11. I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other day.
That is to say, Discord's search actually works. It may not work great, but it will find all posts containing the word "dog" when you search for it. The search in windows explorer, on reddit and on most forums will often fail to find an item even if you search for its exact name. Last I tried it, windows explorer couldn't find a file in the folder I was already viewing. It's impressive.
There we go, another perfect example: https://www.sainsburys.co.uk. Search for "walkers". Enjoy two pages of Walkers products randomly intermixed with other crisps. You'd like the "Walkers Baked" variety? Searching for that returns 2 results, instead of the expected 4+. Example missing result: https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/walkers-baked-se.... Now try searching for "Walkers Baked Ready", different UI (???), same two results, but this time what we're looking for is in the "suggested related products".
How do companies tolerate such obviously awful search experiences?
> I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other day.
That sounds like indexing settings, on your end, are not sufficient for your use cases. I suggest decreasing the interval between indexing on your machine.
If indexing is correctly setup in windows any/all files will be immediately searchable and indexed.
In the past month I've had to use Discord search to find something important twice. Both times it took 20+ minutes and when I actually found the results I noticed that I typed things that ought to have given me the results but just didn't. In one other case I never actually found the correct message but found the URL I was looking for elsewhere and decided to try it out to see if it'd find the correct message. Pasting literally the exact URL did point to the correct message but no other combination of host, part of URL, etc. would.
While that's not technically unusable it's far beyond the level where I'll even try to find something in Discord unless it's very important.
Discord does support other search features. It would be nice to have a wildcard search, for sure--but, in my experience, even on busy and large servers I very rarely can't narrow something down to what I was looking for with `from` and `in` along with not-just-single-keyword matching.
But also, it's chat, so I don't really care if on the once-per-month I use the search I have to think about it for a second, because all the other stuff is there and it's good.
Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very relevant.
Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of backlogging.
You need the "message-tags" extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-tags) and message-ids support (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-ids.html) for that to even be entertained, plus probably echo-message (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/echo-message). I've no idea how well those are supported in servers, to say nothing of clients (which would need a way to surface message ids, and possibly permalinks).
At that point, you probably also want the WIP chathistory extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory) which provides backlog support.