No IRC in Kopete for KDE 4.1?

[Derek Broughton]

Dotan Cohen wrote:

> 2008/8/28 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
>> 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.
> 
> So would the idea of 500 people receiving the same email.

It's not even similar - the irc "problem" (actually any chat room) is not
that 500 people are listening, but that 100 people talk at once.  So not
that 500 of us get the same email, but that we get our email by digest, all
at once.

At a party, multiple conversations occur, but you only participate in (at
most) 3 at a time - and most people can't even handle 2.  Now, my wife
insists that my family is insane, because the number of conversations
around the dinner table is on the order of n!, where n is the number of
people at the dinner table, and I can handle that, but I can't handle it in
text.

> The fact is that IRC scales great from one on 
> one chats up to support channels that rival email mailing lists. In
> fact, that's mostly what I use it for.

You say so, and I've no doubt the protocol works that well, but I'm far from
the only person who finds it impossible to follow irc.
-- 
derek