No IRC in Kopete for KDE 4.1?

[Derek Broughton]

Gordon Schulz wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:00, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>> For me, it's irrelevant, I've never understood how IRC continues to
>> survive...
> What are the alternatives to choose from for large chat rooms empowering
> big communities based on an open protocol supported by a bazillion of
> clients suitable for all tastes with lots of servers connected in large
> networks?

The whole concept of "large" chat rooms seems wrong.  If you put 500 people
in a room, you don't end up with 500 people chatting, you get 100 people in
about 30-50 isolated groups and 400 people lurking.  So a workable chat
design would allow a "main" room, from which people routinely carve out a
smaller discussion area that filters out the background noise.  It probably
needs to be a threaded design, so that it's automatic - when I reply to a
specific statement, it creates an implicit conversation.  It might even be
possible to overlay that on the irc protocol, but without it I find irc
unworkable for anything more than a few people.
-- 
derek