Jan 26, 2019

Old IRC interface for new IRC - Discord

While Matrix still gaining traction and is somewhat in flux, Slack slowly dies in a fire (hopefully!), Discord seem to be the most popular IRC of the day, especially in any kind of gaming and non-technical communities.

So it's only fitting to use same familiar IRC clients for the new thing, even though it doesn't officially support it.

Started using it initially via bitlbee and bitlbee-discord, but these don't seem to work well for that - you can't just /list or /join channels, multiple discord guilds aren't handled too well, some useful features like chat history aren't easily available, (surprisingly common) channel renames are constant pain, hard to debug, etc - and worst of all, it just kept loosing my messages, making some conversations very confusing.

So given relatively clear protocols for both, wrote my own proxy-ircd bridge eventually - https://github.com/mk-fg/reliable-discord-client-irc-daemon

Which seem to address all things that annoyed me in bitlbee-discord nicely, as obviously that was the point of implementing whole thing too.

Being a single dependency-light (only aiohttp for discord websockets) python3 script, should be much easier to tweak and test to one's liking.

Quite proud of all debug and logging stuff there in particular, where you can easily get full debug logs from code and full protocol logs of irc, websocket and http traffic at the moment of any issue and understand, find and fix is easily.

Hopefully Matrix will eventually get to be more common, as it - being more open and dev-friendly - seem to have plenty of nice GUI clients, which are probably better fit for all the new features that it has over good old IRC.