The IRC gateway on Jabberzac has been around for a while, but I keep forgetting to tell people about it. This is me telling people about it. Hello, I am an IT professional.

If you need to talk to some people from the 20th century, you can now add any IRC channel as a chat room in any XMPP client you’re using. It’s pretty straightforward, instead of adding, say, lobby@conference.jabberzac.org you just use an extended room name with IRC channel and server included. So as per the attached screenshot, if you want to check out some cool cat pictures with your buddies in channel #testzac on irc.freenode.net you’d connect to a room named #testzac%irc.freenode.net@irc.jabberzac.org.

Yeah, looks a bit unwieldy but you only need to do it once so harden the fuck up OK? Once you’re done you’re able to treat the room like any other and be connected to the same resource from multiple clients at once.

Please note though that there’s no support right now for SSL connections to the IRC server, so this is all cleartext between Jabberzac’s servers and whatever IRC host you’re connecting to. SSL is possible, I just haven’t bothered fiddling with it yet. If anyone really cares a lot you can hassle me about it I guess.

Have fun, go nuts, or do whatever I’m not your mum.