Haven't used IRC for a while, want to set up a channel from website. Any suggestions for a good website frontend and irc network? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Knigel · 2014-02-09 03:47 I appreciate your advice. It's been a while, so I'd like to get up to date on which services I should use. I'm looking for something convenient that people who aren't used to irc can use from my website. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2014-02-09 04:13 You can look into using my network, Techman's World IRC :). My network supports all of the major web clients, and it is small so it can use a community to help increase its overall user base. As for web clients, I can honestly say that KiwiIRC is the way to go. Mibbit has a terrible user interface is is full of advertisements for their free version, and their staff is lazy to fix a bug where WebIRC isn't used (and it still isn't fixed). For services, if you are looking at features you'll want to choose a network that runs Anope (mine does this too). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElementalAlchemist · 2014-02-09 06:56 For an embeddable front-end, I can say good things about [KiwiIRC](http://kiwiirc.com). As for a network: You can basically use any network, unless you're looking for particular features. Are you looking for any particular features? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- shadowh511 · 2014-02-09 16:04 Web-based frontends: - [kiwiirc](http://kiwiirc.com) - [Mibbit](http://mibbit.com) - [LightIRC](http://www.lightirc.com/) Note that it might be hard to get this working on networks that don't have Flash Policy Daemons configured Overall though, you're probably better off contacting the individual IRC network you choose and seeing what webclient they use. A couple tips when picking a network: - Check if the network supports IP address cloaking. Many big networks like Freenode, EFNet and IRCnet don't support IP cloaking and people that connect from your website can easily have their IP address shown to other users on every message or every time they join a channel. - Evaluate the community of the network This is the social engineering research thing that a lot of people (like me) like getting to do but can't always justify the time for. Join the top 10 channels randomly, participate in them or just lurk. You can usually tell the attitude of a network by the top 10 channels and what goes on there. - Talk to the staff at least once Some networks (FurNet is an example) are really anal about web- based clients connecting to their servers. It's always good to make sure you have the go-ahead to embed a client in a website before you just go out and do it. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask them in a comment below or just PM me, I'd be happy to help clarify things. EDIT: Most networks host an instance of [qwebirc](http://qwebirc.org), so you would need more information about things like what network you want to use before proceeding further. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Myrtti · 2014-02-09 18:11 Few things that need to be said though first off, about freenode: freenode has a specific purpose - it supplies real time discussion facilities for free, open source, and peer-directed projects, companies and communities: http://freenode.net/policy.shtml#ontopic, http://blog.freenode.net/2008/04/registering-a-channel-on-freenode/ . If you're not an exact match on these, you can still use freenode for your purposes, but you might be better off starting with a ##-channel instead of #. If questions arise, feel free to join #freenode and ask for clarification, or shoot an email to support@freenode.net (ignore the parts on the policy page about group registration - we're waiting for the new group management system to be published so the methods described do not necessarily work) Secondly, freenode does support IP address cloaking, but it's not something a user can turn on and off themselves. Freenode provides cloaks to registered users primarily to allow them show their affiliation with a registered group, or lack of that affiliation. Cloaks don't offer a great, strong protection to the IP addresses of the users so if the user is really genuinely concerned, they can connect to freenode using TOR: http://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml#tor (which requires a registered account first). Plain cloaks can be quite trivially bypassed by a determined person so enabling them by default, allowing the user to switch it on and off themselves can be not only giving the users a false sense of security, but also a mean to bypass mutes and bans from a channel. Cloaking is done in freenode by staffers by hand by their discression, and there doesn't seem to be any downsides to this policy at least in my opinion. if there's questions about freenode, feel free to ask - but I certainly don't claim to know everything ;-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- shadowh511 · 2014-02-09 18:23 > freenode has a specific purpose Yes, I am aware. I randomly picked the 3 biggest networks I knew of that don't offer usermode-based IP cloaking on every connection (you freenode and your gateway cloaks) for most cases. Freenode is a bit of an exception because their policies about cloaking, etc are weird as compared to something like umode +x cloaking or similar. \>>OP >I'm looking for something convenient that people who aren't used to irc can use from my website. I don't know about you but I'd say that at least for the purposes of embedding a chatroom into a channel, the following is pretty convenient, but IANAE. ``` ``` Also hi ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Myrtti · 2014-02-09 18:38 fair points - my reply wasn't meant to be a 'reply' - more like an addendum to everything you mentioned. Thanks for adding those bits that I forgot to mention. Teamwork! Hi! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- shadowh511 · 2014-02-09 18:50 To be fair it probably is a bad idea to recommend that people settle on places like EFNet and IRCNet anyways because of the insanely high skid ratios there :P ---------------------------------------------------------------------- moxy311 · 2014-02-13 16:10 I used this with success: https://github.com/cjstewart88/nirc