IRC Integration?
I’d like to chime in about IRC. Internet Relay Chat has been around for about the same time as the Web, and is still very, very much used in the free software development community. In other words, IRC users are unlikely to move to a Web-based solution for their chat needs. I know I won’t: a team required me to use Slack, and the first thing I did was to plug into the IRC gateway so I can have it along with my other messaging systems, in my terminal.
I know there’s Mattermost and its IRC gateway, but I’d like to suggest another approach, far lighter than installing a Web-based messaging system that provides full Web fanciness.
Here it goes:
IRC Logs
A Category could maintain IRC logs, one topic per channel, with configurable host and channel.
This feature would automatically capture links and images or video if some are posted, and of course support Markdown if people use it (although it could also use the simpler IRC idiom with a single * for bold, etc.)
Providing IRC logs in Discourse would help make them searchable. Moreover it would allow Discourse users to use shortcut links to relevant IRC channels. These topics would be read-only.
Topic to IRC Channel
This would be the next step, to allow Discourse users to send to a specific IRC channel. Not so difficult using an IRC bot as a trampolineintermediary, but not so elegant. I’d rather not focus on this feature and encourage users to get a proper IRC client, but that could be useful for live support in some specific cases. Honestly I think it’s overkill and would not even try to implement it.
Matching IRC User with Discourse User
Given an IRC network with a NickServ, a Discourse user could indicate their IRC account in their personal profile so that the IRC topics could link to them directly, and so that Discourse would take into account their IRC participation within Discourse participation metrics. This is an interesting feature because more often than not Discourse is not the unique way a community has integrated in its workflow. (And this could be extended to other external services such as a wiki or a gitlab…)