Hi!
Depends on how you define easy.
http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23mediawiki/ is a recording of
everything in #mediawiki by date, oldest at the top, newest at the bottom.
I would consider that fairly easy.
It's easy if your use case is "reading everything on a particular day".
If your use case is "locating that part where John and Mary talked about
FooBar", it's not easy at all. Raw logs are as usable as... well, raw
logs. People do read raw logs from time to time, but usually they employ
tools to make sense of them - e.g. kibana, etc. Of course, it's a bit
strained analogy, but my point is IRC raw logs are not a very good UI
for many use cases.
Don't have a good solution for this, as IRC is still excellent as
transient quick discussion medium, but much less as a long-term
persistent discussion one. OTOH, maybe that should be done with wiki+Flow?
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org