User:JustAnotherArchivist/The Lounge

The Lounge is an IRC client that 'bRInGs IRc To the 21ST cENtURy' by turning it into a web interface, adding file uploads and link previews, and more.

It also has a number of issues. Here are some I've seen complaints about, in no particular order:

• Link prefetching, although disabled by default, gets enabled by many users. There are no options beyond global enable/disable. For example, you can't disable this for specific channels (say, #archivebot) or by URL pattern (say, non-images on transfer.archivete.am). In any decently-sized channel, you can expect the web server to receive a lot of requests from The Lounge users in rapid succession immediately after a link is posted.
• Remote media (e.g. linked images) can get embedded by enabling it in the configuration. However, unless one also enables server-side caching (and hence proxying), they get embedded directly. The description of the configuration option merely paints this as a convenience for avoiding mixed-content warnings when in reality it's required to avoid leaking details about the user all over the web.
• The search is awful to the point of being essentially useless: you can only search in a single channel, and you cannot jump to the context of a search result. Additionally, it is slow at least for heavy users who are in lots of and/or high-bandwidth channels.
• History deletion (disabled by default currently) of 'low-value messages' is portrayed as being suitable for 'data hoarders'. This is not a technical issue, but the attitude towards preservation of one's communications is concerning.
• The layout of the internal SQLite database is ridiculous. Messages get stored as JSON in a TEXT field.
• It is impossible to make The Lounge rotate through multiple IRC network servers, e.g. for fallback when a primary server is down. It doesn't even work with round-robin DNS.
• If you run out of disk space, it goes into a reconnection loop.
• /quitting a server deletes it from the configuration. The documentation makes no attempt to indicate that.
• Netsplits don't get condensed properly: if there is a big one, poof goes your scrollback. This can also happen in other clients if the netsplit is 'weird', i.e. not a regular netsplit where everyone on the other side quits and later rejoins at the same time. But in The Lounge, it happens for all netsplits, even when condensing of joins etc. is enabled, because it's purely cosmetic and the scrollback limit is still in play.
• If you send a message with /msg and don't already have a query/channel window open, that message won't get logged anywhere unless the IRC server supports echo-message. This issue has been open since 2016.