This is exactly why I wrote <a href="https://github.com/thwarted/nodebot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thwarted/nodebot</a>, as a I ran into problems scaling and securing things like supybot, and integrating it with shell scripts. nodebot is announce only, and doesn't join the channels (so your IRC server needs to be setup to allow that), and since it's not centralized, high traffic from one node/service that ends up getting rate throttled by the server doesn't delay messages from other nodes/services. Each machine has an identity, but it can be configured to have a different identity (because I'd rather that git messages come from "git" rather than from the machine that ran the hook).<p>We use it at yelp for monitoring all manner of system status. There's separate channels for scribe log processing, nagios alerts, code deployments, and load balancer status. Our git hooks announce when developers push and merges are happening, and who's branches are being deployed. We get announcements when config files change. And it's all on-demand, if you're not interested in seeing it, you don't need to join the channel, IRC is perfect for these kinds of updates.
My complaint with IRC (and I freely admit that it could be that I am not using the "right" client) is that there is just this <i>sea</i> of text on the screen. There is very little formatting to speak of, and it reminds me of everyone talking at once on a conference call.<p><i>slighty</i> off-topic:
I am proud to say that I was introduced to Wealthfront via HN, and I was so impressed by their engineering blog that I went to their website. And it sounded cool, so I joined.<p>And ever since then, I continue to see some awesome things from them, and so far their investment-matchmaking service has paid off, too.<p>Win-win if I've ever heard one.
At StackVM we use an IRC bot to tell us when the servers are down. In our case the bot is just a DNode service so all the backend needs to do is connect to the IRC service, post its message, and disconnect.<p><a href="http://github.com/substack/rowbit" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/substack/rowbit</a><p>It's a pretty great fit since we already use IRC a ton to coordinate development so we see the notifications right away.
Interesting to see someone who is using IRC in this fashion. I personally have been an advocate of using XMPP in the same way. While IRC offers a good amount of features, XMPP provides the ability to scale and dive into multiple different realms. Just one example that comes to mind is constant updates from your XMPP bots, channels, etc. in a single location similar to Twitter, but for your development.