There's a WIP spec for batched messages, which will be useful to group netsplit-related join/part messages, and for history playback: http://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html

IRCCloud will be happy to support this as a client in due course. We also run our own custom IRCd for teams, which gives us a nice testing ground for implementing new bits of the server spec.

I think IRC won't support offline messages as it somehow conflicts with the whole protocol. You can achieve this with your own setup via ZNC, but then you need a server running 24x7.

IRC will hopefully stay as the preferred option for technical discussions, but we will need something else for personal communication (with increased privacy too).

We have XMPP, which is complex, lacking and has too much client fragmentation. And emerging things such as Signal, Tox, Ring or Matrix.

It's a challenge to implement offline messages and P2P. Even server federation is not easy if you want really nice crypto. E.g., see Signal.

You could add offline messages but they'd have to be account-directed (as in nickserv account) rather than nick-directed.

To give a usecase where tagging/requesting/etc offline messages is useful: using ZNC.

instead one currently needs to shell into their ZNC box and start grepping through logs, not pleasant

(there is a backlog module, however it required a bit of silly configuration and didn't support getting anything other than chat lines)

Perhaps I configured it wrongly but when I forget to close my IRC client at work then ZNC is not buffering and showing me anything on the other clients when I log in.

Yep, you would have to change the settings a bit if you want that behaviour.

Connect to your ZNC’s web frontend, and then go to:

ZNC » webadmin » Edit User [the name of the user you’re editing] » Edit Network [the name of the network you’re editing]

Then checkmark the following:

• awaystore¹ (Adds auto-away with logging, useful when you use ZNC from different locations)

• simple_away² (This module will automatically set you away on IRC while you are disconnected from the bouncer.) [You probably already have this checked]

(This is assuming you’re on ZNC 1.6.1 like me).

――――――

¹ — http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away

² — http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore

It's not there. I would say that this just tweaks IRC, rather than adds much needed features. A little bit of too little, too late.

I really wish IRC and other open protocols had a chance against Slack and the entire walled-garden ecosystem. Personally I'm highly willing to do some extra-setup in order to at least own the history of all my messages (not to mention the ridiculousness of separate Slack groups requiring separate logins) - of course this is a developers take, which excludes all the other employees..

Ultimately the Out-of-the-box some setup required has in as much doomed IRC as desktop Linux. The obvious problem being that the people that are interested in working on these things for free are nerds who are okay with the setup -- which just perpetuates a closed-cycle.

We are providing an option to bring together walled gardens with matrix.org: an open standard for federated distributed and persistent communications. It does give you the option to run your own server and bridge to other services like IRC (and Slack actually). We're also building Vector.im as a glossy client on top of Matrix to precisely address the fact that non techy users need something easy to use. So all this might answer your concern :)