DigitalIRC

Webchat Refresh

New and shiny #

Since day 1 of DigitalIRC we have had a webchat. It was one of the reasons this network was actually started.

Our current webchat is TheLounge and has been working quite well for DigitalIRC for several years. It has one major downside for us though. We have to host it on our servers.

That is why with in UnrealIRCd 6.0.5 adding websocket support in 2022, we've been working on adding websockets as an available method to connect to the IRC network.

Today we are announcing two websocket based clients which are hosted on DigitalIRC domains but are fully static websites hosted on our CDN edge. KiwiIRC and Gamja

KiwiIRC is a returning client, we used an older version of it without websockets before the move to TheLounge, and Gamja is a simple IRC client in the browser which and is the webchat client of choice for one of the largest IRC networks.

Webchat is dead! Long live the Webchat #

As these two new webchats are rolled out we must also announce that Gamja will as of January 2025 become the new default webchat with TheLounge webchat (moving to lounge.webchat.digitalirc.org) eventually being retired by July 2025.

If you use TheLounge webchat embedded into a website, your embedded url options WILL CHANGE.

On the good side you can now host your own webchat and set any custom options you want!

For Gamja please see this page for a list of URL parameters you can set. For KiwiIRC please see this page for a list of URL parameters you can set.

So websockets? #

So we've been trialing websockets connecting to IRC for nearly 2 years and we now consider them to be good enough for GA. If you want to connect to the IRC via a websocket a round robin address has been setup.

To connect use wss://irc-websocket.digitalirc.org:8433. Currently there are 3 servers configured to offer websocket connections, and we only offer secure websockets.