If you feel that it could improve, contribute to the IRCv3 working group! http://ircv3.net/

Why is IRCv3 still relegating chat history to "IRC bouncers" instead of making it a feature of the protocol?

Chat history makes chat more usable, and it makes it usable at all on intermittent connections.

why would they include that? (Seriously curious)

As far as i can tell it would add no benefit but only overhead to the protocol.

My opinion is because it's the vital feature, after sending and receiving images itself, that irc needs.

It's like asking why would http protocol allow users to send data. Receiving is enough.

Regulation. Having a full record of important conversations to fall back to for legal reasons is a big part of both corporate and governmental policies. Clinton's emails being deleted being an example of why ethereal messages are not taken lightly

Are you okay with missing messages, or do you only ever communicate with people over an always-on wired connection?

IMO thats the magic of IRC. Channels i care about i bounce, channels i do not care i dont bounce in. If messages would wait for me that would mean so much overhead for the protocol.

I like IRC because its simple. I've build a IRC out of boredom, and a bouncer because the one i used missed a feature i wanted. Please nobody take that simplicity away :/

I just thought about the server implementation. This is simply not dueable. IRC servers are ment to run thousands of users, caching messages would be awful.

What's the timeline for getting IRCv3 ratified?

Ratified with/by who?

Perhaps ratified is the wrong word. When is v3 going to be solidified where we'll see production implementation of the spec/new features?

As far as I know, v3 features are already in use on some servers.

e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687798

There's also an IRCv3 section on blog.irccoud.com but I can't access it from here.

Whatever relevant working group would be responsible for standard ratification within the IETF, much like RFCs 1459 and 2812?