Convore Shutting Down

Grove is fantastic. I've been using IRC to communicate with my team forever and we were just using freenode. I finally got around to setting up an IRC server on one of our machines but when it came time to configuring and securing it properly it was going to take days to read through all that documentation, so I just locked it down at the firewall level and we all connect using a forwarded SSH port, or from the local host (we all use irssi as our chat client anyway).<p>A (rather large) ad agency that a friend of mine works for has a small group of people that wanted a collaboration solution and they all liked IRC so I sold them a monthly VPS with an IRC server configured but guess what - they have to forward a port to connect. That was cool, they said, they're on OSX and I provided them with scripts that just setup the port and opened Adium for them in a single click ... then along came a contractor that wanted to use windows :S<p>So I said look: you can pay me to figure out all this shit for you, it'll take me days and cost you thousands of dollars, but for that same money you could buy a few <i>years</i> of a grove.io subscription and I can still connect all the same bots that I've got running for you.<p>Seriously the price point they've got there is great. Properly configuring and securing a high availability IRC server isn't as simple as "set and forget" you have to do quite a bit of reading and configuring in order to get it running properly. Plus Grove has a bunch of web configuration options that are really handy for less technical folks.<p>IRC is the chat technology of the past, present, and future, keep it up guys.

I signed up and tried grove a few weeks ago, I didn't really see the point. I then stumbled across some video tutorials for using hook.io to connect to an IRC server (#4,5 in the list of video tutorials) (<a href="http://blog.nodejitsu.com/hookio-video-tutorials" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nodejitsu.com/hookio-video-tutorials</a>) and immediately thought of grove.<p>It seems, to me, that they decided to use the tutorial, hook up web sockets (#9 in the tutorial list), add a nice interface, log all the events hook.io emits, and decided to charge way too much for it.<p>I could be missing something, but that was my initial impression.

Paul Graham said. "We're trying to figure out why this YC batch did so well. One theory: they all used Convore (<a href="http://convore.com)" rel="nofollow">http://convore.com)</a><p>What actually made the startups switch <i>away</i> from convore? At the point pg said that, quite a number must have been using it. Then they just stopped?

So they burnt the Convore customers ... why would I trust them with Grove, exactly?<p>Pivoting in real life is an elegant move; this feels more like stumble-and-run.

Late last year I was in an incubator where Convore started. There were 2 other companies doing the same exact thing .. All of the YC companies were using HipChat, Convore seemed like "yet another copycat site to sign up for an account with". Chat is a solved problem. Let's move on.

My opinion when I got accounts on Convore and Pownce: "This is neat, I guess."<p>I can't quite articulate what I think they did wrong... but these products just felt too startupy to survive.

I would have preferred to see an extended read-only period, rather than a month in which to panic-download your data (and the export functionality seems to be broken right now too <a href="https://convore.com/export" rel="nofollow">https://convore.com/export</a> ).<p>I'd really like it if there was more time to capture the site and submit copy to the internet archive. I'll see what I can do with archive team.<p>So long, and thanks for all the data! Perhaps convore is an apt name for something that consumes your history. :-)

I'm working on a site with functionality similar to convore. Discussion is centered around links in a manner similar to reddit or HN. Just finished an alpha test, you can register for the beta at <a href="http://b00st.com" rel="nofollow">http://b00st.com</a>.

I don't understand Grove. Why would you pay so much for hosted IRC with very limited users? $10/m for 5 users seems crazy high to me.

Im glad the team is moving on, bigger and better! But why not keep the site up. How expensive could it be to show your commitment to the few users you do have. If anything it builds a good reputation on keeping your projects going even if it wasn't the massive success the founders wanted. Im all for progress but every project doesn't need to die does it?

I never quite got Convore. Grove is sort of interesting, but I doubt it'll displace us from HipChat.<p>The major advantage of using a non-proprietary protocol like IRC is that people can choose their own clients... but the state of most IRC clients nowadays is abysmal. Colloquy on OS X, for example, hasn't been updated in years.<p>If I was going to use IRC to communicate with my team, I'd just create a private channel on Freenode. We'd miss out on archiving, but I don't think that that feature alone is worth $2/user/month.

I still get a weekly email from Convore telling me about new posts in the groups I belong to, and when I try to click through to them, I get sent to arbitrary pages. How can one unsubscribe from the mails?

Honest question: why would I use Grove over HipChat?

Looks like they gave it a year: <a href="http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2011/02/16/technology-behind-convore/" rel="nofollow">http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2011/02/16/technology-behind-con...</a><p>I'm not trying to dance on their grave or anything, but from reading this article it appears a company I worked with last summer had read it as well, and that level of -- let's call it "sophisticated" -- messaging architecture was <i>beyond unwieldy</i> for an early-stage company. I can understand wanting to avoid Michael Arrington calling you "amateur hour" when things fall over under popularity, but there's a such thing as overengineering.<p>I realize my opinion might be based on a red herring or strawman, but when chat is the "Hello World" of server-side JS I'm just not sure there was enough <i>outside of the architecture</i> to hang a company on.

Grove looks really interesting.<p>The pricing strikes me as a bit odd though.<p>You're actually charging more per user for more users ($2 per user for 5 users; $2.50 per user for 50 users), rather than giving larger accounts a discount. I imagine the reason for it is the load it places on your infrastructure, but I've rarely seen that kind of price stacking work in the wild.

I still dont get who would use grove? IRC users aren't exactly looking for a client replacement. Existing IRC clients just work, like Craiglist. Colloquy on the Mac, etc.

irc ? 2012 ? .................................