&gt; The primary issue is that the use of bouncers results in habits which result in the information being inaccessible to other people, other people who may not yet be able to decode the logs.<p>But what happens in the absence of bouncers? Is the information even written down at all? (IME: often no). If the information ends up on a mailing list or issue tracker, is that any more accessible to other people than IRC history? (IME: again no).<p>Rather than try to get people to change their habits, it would be better to produce tooling that supports the use strategies people have evidently found effective:<p>* Public, indexed&#x2F;searchable chat logs in a place that&#x27;s easy for newcomers to find them (many OSS projects do this already)<p>* Chat systems where you don&#x27;t have to do some complex bouncer setup to be able to participate on the same level as the core contributors (e.g. Slack or Gitter, where scrollback is available to every user, even newcomers)<p>* Support for indexing into useful pieces of chat log, or for excerpting parts of a log into a more permanent home. Slack does something a bit like this (persistent snippets in a channel). HipChat offers some level of integration with Atlassian&#x27;s terrible wiki product. Google wave seemed to have this as part of its idea.