Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.

I wasn’t in the room when IRC.mozilla.org was stood up, but from what I’ve heard IRC wasn’t “chosen” so much as it was the obvious default, the only tool available in the late ’90s. Suffice to say that as a globally distributed organization, Mozilla has relied on IRC as our main synchronous communications tool since the beginning. For much of that time it’s served us well, if for some less-than-ideal values of “us” and “well”.

Like a lot of the early internet IRC is a quasi-standard protocol built with far more of the optimism of the time than the paranoia the infosec community now refers to as “common sense”, born before we learned how much easier it is to automate bad acts than it is to foster healthy communities. Like all unauthenticated systems on the modern net it’s aging badly and showing no signs of getting better.

While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues and getting connected to this now-obscure forum is an unnecessary technical barrier for anyone finding their way to Mozilla via the web. Available interfaces really haven’t kept up with modern expectations, spambots and harassment are endemic to the platform, and in light of that it’s no coincidence that people trying to get in touch with us from inside schools, colleges or corporate networks are finding that often as not IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls at all.

All of that adds up to a set of real hazards and unnecessary barriers to participation in the Mozilla project; we definitely still need a globally-available, synchronous and text-first communication tool; our commitment to working in the open as an organization hasn’t changed. But we’re setting a higher bar for ourselves and our communities now and IRC can’t meet that bar. We’ve come to the conclusion that for all IRC’s utility, it’s irresponsible of us to ask our people – employees, volunteers, partners or anyone else – to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and productive.

In short, it’s no longer practical or responsible for us to keep that forum alive.

In the next small number of months, Mozilla intends to deprecate IRC as our primary synchronous-text communications platform, stand up a replacement and decommission irc.mozilla.org soon afterwards. I’m charged with leading that process on behalf of the organization.

Very soon, I’ll be setting up the evaluation process for a couple of candidate replacement stacks. We’re lucky; we’re spoiled for good options these days. I’ll talk a bit more about them in a future post, but the broad strokes of our requirements are pretty straightforward:

We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs.

It needs to be accessible to the greater Mozilla community.

We are evaluating products, not protocols.

We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack.

While we’re investigating options for semi-anonymous or pseudonymous connections, we will require authentication, because:

The Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines will apply, and they’ll be enforced.

I found this at the top of a draft FAQ I’d started putting together a while back. It might not be what you’d call “complete”, but maybe it is:

Q: Why are we moving away from IRC? IRC is fine!

A: IRC is not fine. Q: Seriously? You’re kidding, right?

A: I’m dead serious.

I don’t do blog comments anymore – unfortunately, for a lot of the same reasons I’m dealing with this – but if you’ve got questions, you can email me.

Or, if you like, you can find me on IRC.