IRCCloud as a company is an active member of the working group. I'm not sure how we would be co-opting any standard, but we implement them, and yes, we do sell a service.

It's closed in the sense that we provide a proprietary API on top of IRC and you need to sign up to our service to enjoy any benefit from it. But it's open in the sense that you can connect to any open IRC server, and if you choose to no longer use our service, you can download your logs, pick up any other client and continue to use IRC without having to recreate your community from scratch.

How suspicious you should be of all the above is entirely up to you.

When we're under heavy load (e.g. Freenode is netsplitting) our cache can get backed up. The cache is where your logs are served from when you reconnect a client.

At the moment we don't do a good job of detecting a slow cache and re-requesting from the primary log storage, but we're working on a fix for that, as well as improving cache performance so it doesn't get backed up as much.

It just so happened that there was a large split on Freenode earlier today, around the time you posted this message.

[1] https://github.com/kaniini/ircv3-harmony

For things that are common requests, we work on adding appropriate settings, but it's impossible to give everyone exactly what they want, so custom user stylesheets and scripts are generally the answer.

Check out https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/irccloud for some examples, have a look on our wiki: https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki or join our #themes channel on irc.irccloud.com for info and help on customising the ui.

Often, the best community extensions get integrated into the app, but we're still a small team so it can take time :)

To clarify, the changes detailed here are to do with IRC as a low level protocol. While these enhancements do have user benefit, many of the user experience improvements we work on aren't necessarily at the protocol level.

For instance, things like file sharing, persistent logging, synced mobile clients, push notifications etc can all be built as extra infrastructure on top of the protocol. In the same way that the Slack protocol doesn't give you file sharing without somewhere to host hose files, IRC as a protocol is less useful without services built around it. And that's the main benefit to using a service like IRCCloud.

However, it's worth noting that an important aspect of the IRCv3 effort is around introducing new data types to the protocol. Things like message tags and metadata, that will enable client developers to offer new features that would be hard or impossible to implement without breaking a lot of the existing ecosystem around IRC. And it's the existing open communities on IRC that represent a major advantage over closed proprietary chat systems.

Some examples of things that could be achieved with these new data types and mechanisms:

* If you wanted to add avatars, there isn't a standard place to put it that all clients will know how to access. A metadata key enables that.

* A bot that supports some form of rich payload, e.g. a quoted snippet from a linked website, with a favicon and preview image. You could provide this with message tags.

There are also interesting opportunities with the -notify capabilities. Being able to receive status updates (e.g. if someone goes away or identifies) lets clients present useful presence indicators for people you're chatting with.

I can imagine these being combined in interesting ways. For example, label a message with an id tag and then receive fave-notify messages for it, to allow a "starring" feature.

For IRC to be a competitor to modern chat alternatives it needs a combination of these improved protocol features as well as a support infrastructure.

  * Front end engineering (on site or remote)
  * Design (on site)

IRCCloud is an IRC client and bouncer without all the baggage. We keep you connected all the time. Stay in sync and get notified wherever you are with our web and mobile apps. We also host private IRC servers for teams and have a self-hosted version for enterprise. Plus, upload code snippets and files (soon!), search your logs (soon!), and images, videos, tweets embedded inline

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FRONT END ENGINEERING

IRCCloud is a long running rich web application with real time performance needs. If you're up for the challenge of making a website feel like a desktop app and have deep experience with the following then email your CV to jobs@irccloud.com

  * Backbone/Underscore/React
  * jQuery
  * CSS/SASS
  * WebSockets
  * gulp/browserify
  * JS step debugging

DESIGN

IRC has a reputation as a chat tool for hackers, and a long history to go with it, but it's not always been associated with brilliant design. We've set out to fix that by giving IRC a beautiful and intuitive home on the web and mobile devices.

Our focus is on functional elegance, clarity, and making complex things obvious. And it's time to step it up a notch. We're looking for someone to help us make IRC more appealing to those who've never used it to collaborate before, while still making sure the old hands feel at home.

We need to respect the IRC community, and the limitations of the medium, while making bold decisions that question the conventions of the last 25 years. We're not building something completely new, trendy, and unproven. IRC is still thriving for a reason, and you'll be responsible for better aligning it with the way people communicate online today.

Ideally, you'll have several years of experience designing for the web and mobile, with a strong graphic design background. A working knowledge of HTML/CSS for in-browser prototyping would be a significant bonus.

Email a portfolio and CV to jobs@irccloud.com to apply