I'm trying to set up a small, persistent chat channel at work, but our success with IRC has been limited. I've tried two IRC daemons (InspIRCd and WeIRCd) and many clients but we frequently get "Connection reset by peer." As far as I can tell, it and most other messages are pretty much due to IRC being a terrible protocol and no client or daemon will be able to fix it. InspIRCd is supposed to be one of the best daemons and it still gave us issues. I don't know what major IRC networks due to prevent this from happening, but for us it's unpredictable and we can't figure out why it happens.

Anyone know of alternatives? There's SILC, but that limits people to using Pidgin or a crappy command line tool for the client. I'd prefer to use something that has at least an easily-accessible web client. I know Jabber/Gchat has group chat but I'm not aware of any way to make a persistent "channel."

Any ideas? It has to be free, at least at the moment.

if connection is reset by peer, it's probably a problem with your connection and not IRC. Still, you're right, IRC is a very old protocol.

I'm not sure, but google Wave might be useful for this.

It happens to several of us on different internet connections (working remotely) and we have no other connectivity problems.

edit a text file over ssh.

*sets read only*

# chattr +i chat.txt

We use Jabber at work. You can set up persisent chatrooms and at least Pidgin has the option of autoconnecting to a channel on startup.
Everything felt a bit unintuitiv to set up but once everything is running it's great.
One great feature is that you get all the messages that are written in a room even if you haven't been online at the time.

well its not free and not really a persistent chat, but we use microsoft office communicator at work.

Thanks landfish, that doesn't help at all.

Impi, that seems like the best option. There's a variety of Jabber clients, including web based clients. I wonder if there's a way we can integrate it with Google Apps on our domain. I searched specifically for Google Apps and go no answer.

I know Google Chat can be linked with other networks, so maybe through that?

Theres a new server softare out now.

It's called RLC.

We're working remotely, from hundreds of miles away, dumbass.

Well stop it.

I'm pretty sure that's what Emon is trying to prevent.

Not since using IRC

Emon, go to Science, Academics and Philosophy and check out "Let's discuss this argument against computationalism."

Philosophers will make up **** about anything to get published!

Didn't everyone else decide years ago that CTM was a naive and incomplete way to view cognition