There's only IRC loggers that you can see, though - if you know (practically) everyone in a channel at a given point in time, you're reasonably safe - not 100%, but reasonably. Which is about good enough for most things.
My point is that chat logs make IRC a lot more "on the record" than in-person discussions in practice (even if not in theory). Anyone who's keeping a log can quote directly from it, and those quotes are credible (if nothing else, because the person posting them doesn't know who else was keeping a log and can call out inaccurate quotes).
With IRC it is/was common that people run loggers and publish them. In the past IRC conversations, especially in tech/support channels, were easily found. Today you don't find many on Google, but that problem was already solved way better than it is today.
It's common for people to log channels - either directly via the server or via a bot that sits in the room and just records everything. Logs can be exposed via various web frontends, most of which are pretty limited feature-wise.
Most IRC clients do not log out of the box, so direct messages from other users are easily lost unless you go out of your way to make sure - the server does not do this logging for you.
You realize logging IRC and distributing said logs can be completely automatic, right? Anyone can set that up. It's honestly kind of humorous that you find this to be such a mountain to climb.
Oddly enough, I prefer the IRC channels I frequent to not be logged, just like the conversation I'm having at the corner coffee shop (probably) isn't logged beyond the ears of those who hear it.
To me it helps create more of a community feel. Often times you'll see active community members turn problems they deal with on IRC into blogs, articles or even books to spread that knowledge.
I know everything is logged but I basically quit using irc when tons of channels started having bots that would log EVERYTHING in a room to public urls.
But it is really cool that I can read channel logs from events, like 9/11.
Most IRC networks are relatively small and/or are/were run by techies with no real incentive to log everything. Also, almost everything culturally about IRC relies on trusting the IRC operators to keep things running smoothly and moderate appropriately.
UnrealIRCd (a popular IRC server implementation) have actively refused to add features in to the code-base that allow IRC operators to snoop on private messages or covertly on channels, for example.
Slack, Facebook, Reddit, and whoever else we all use these days, keep every private message ever sent logged for all time and this is just accepted.
> You can't obviously connect an individual lurker to a log
I don't think that's necessarily true.
While I don't know if the IRC Server software supports it, there's no reason you couldn't encode some kind of unique tag into the stream of IRC messages sent to each client. Unless you were running two clients and diffing their logs you wouldn't notice.
It could be as simple as seeing additional events, or modified whois/client information on join/leave, or even completely fake client join/leaves.
You're suggesting people scour logs for missed messages as if that's seriously your pitch for "IRC has that, too."
This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's the users who are idiots."
Nearly everyone I know has a 24/7 irc bouncer that is connected and stores logs. It does indeed raise the complexity of using irc but you can bet for sure that some subcultures on irc behave this way
In my experience, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an IRC log in a search result.
#haskell on Libra is publicly logged, but I couldn’t get Google to return a quoted phrase from a message a few weeks ago.
Many people on IRC don’t enjoy being in logged channels. I’ve also heard that there are GDPR implications to publicly logging people’s messages without their consent.
Discussion of the difficulty and downsides of IRC logging, from a coulple years ago:
I'm precisely speaking about seeing the logs when not connected. The sense of community on IRC is lower because you need to connect all the time and otherwise loose what everyone said.
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