IRC in the first half of 2026: what actually changed

Plenty happened in IRC this year, and almost none of it was the protocol standing still. This is the half-year in the order it matters to someone who uses IRC — not project by project.

Replies and reactions are now real #

The single biggest change: in February 2026 IRCv3 ratified the reply client tag and the WebSocket specification. Ratified means out of draft, safe to build on, and expected to stay.

reply is what lets a client say "this message is a response to that one", which is the foundation for both threaded replies and the react client tag sitting on top of it. Reactions and replies have been drifting through drafts for years. They are now a documented part of IRC.

WebSocket matters for a different reason: it is how a browser talks IRC without a gateway in the middle. Ratifying it is the protocol formally admitting that web clients are first-class.

Three specs were updated alongside them — react gained +draft/unreact so a reaction can be taken back, and Metadata and client-batch were tightened. Two new drafts appeared: extended-isupport, which lets a client read ISUPPORT before registering, and network-icon, so networks can advertise a logo.

That last one sounds trivial and is not: it is why goguma can now show network icons in a mobile list that previously looked like undifferentiated text.

The clients caught up fast #

The gap between "ratified" and "in your client" was unusually short this year.

Halloy had the busiest run of any graphical client — emoji reactions, typing indicators, replies, redaction, file upload via FILEHOST, multi-line send, and in 2026.8 a channel monitor, an in-app config editor and system keyring storage for passwords.

The Lounge added /cleartopic, msgid handling, STATUSMSG for actions, and a serious pass on accessibility and mobile keyboards.

Convos did something rarer: it rewrote its backend from Perl to Go, and dropped the plugin system and CMS along the way. The repository is now predominantly Go. It also gained OIDC login and Web Push notifications.

senpai picked up spell checking and Windows binaries; goguma gained network icons, video sharing, and the ability to un-react.

WeeChat had the busiest and least comfortable year of the lot. It added -e to /eval, a customisable typing indicator, and in 4.10 a full theming system with a light theme that applies itself on light terminals. It also shipped eight security advisories between May and July, including a critical relay authentication bypass in 4.9.4 and, a week later, memory-safety bugs in the IRC plugin itself that reach every user rather than just relay operators. If you run WeeChat and have not updated since June, that is the item to act on.

Servers and bouncers #

Ergo added PostgreSQL and SQLite history backends, HTTP API endpoints, and certificate fingerprint authentication — then shipped 2.19.1 on 5 August to fix three security holes, two of them high severity. If you run Ergo, that upgrade is the one item on this page with a deadline.

InspIRCd is still working toward 5.0.0 — a call for testers went out in April, and development builds were still landing in August. Not released yet.

UnrealIRCd added draft/multiline, SETIDENT and SETNAME controls, and IPv6 throttling improvements. Solanum picked up BATCH, no-implicit-names, channel-context, reply and labeled-response, plus a quarantine module.

soju gained CHATHISTORY AROUND and a Quassel PostgreSQL importer — the latter being a quiet gift to anyone migrating off an abandoned bouncer. ZNC turned on SSL by default for server connections and added standard hardening headers.

Provenance became a topic #

The most genuinely new development of the year is not technical.

On 22 July, Codeberg's members voted 358 to 144, with 14 abstentions, to change the platform's terms of use to prohibit "vibe-coded" projects — those created by autonomous LLM agents, maintained largely through them, or consuming resources out of proportion to human involvement. A large amount of IRC software lives on Codeberg.

Two weeks later, on 4 August, IRCv3 added an AI-assisted marker to its software tables: a grey robot icon meaning "development assisted using AI". Three clients carry it so far, The Lounge among them.

Neither decision came with a precise threshold for what counts. Both are, for now, disclosure rather than prohibition on the IRC side. It is the first time the IRC ecosystem has tried to label how software was made.

New, and pleasantly strange #

bIRC arrived as a native macOS client with an unusually complete IRCv3 feature list, into a platform that had just lost Textual. Closed source, which will matter to some.

geoIRC is an IRC client for Commodore GEOS, written in 6502 assembly and distributed as a 1581 disk image, with the full source shipped as PDFs typeset in GEOS laser fonts. Networking comes via Ultimate-series cartridge hardware. It is not a joke project, and it is a decent reminder that a protocol you can implement on a 1 MHz machine has advantages a protocol you cannot does not.

Mensajitos, a React Native client for Android and iOS, went public in June. Pidgin shipped its first two 3.0 alphas — 2.95.0 and 2.96.0 — with a new account editor and avatar support.

What was struck off #

On 7 August the IRCv3 tables removed six clients as unmaintained: HexChat, LimeChat, IceChat, Colloquy, Ambassador and Moon Moon. Each had a stated reason and most had been dormant for five years or more.

Add Textual's sunset in July and Palaver's disappearance from the App Store in January, and the desktop and mobile fields both got noticeably thinner this year — while the protocol itself got busier. Those two facts are not in tension. Fewer clients are being maintained; the ones that are, are moving fast.

What to do about it #

• Running Ergo? Upgrade to 2.19.1 today — three advisories, two high severity.
• Running WeeChat? Get to 4.9.5 or later. Two of the July bugs are in the IRC plugin, so not running a relay is no longer protection.
• On HexChat, LimeChat, IceChat or Colloquy? Nothing breaks tomorrow, but nobody is fixing anything either. Where to go instead.
• Want reactions and replies? You need a client and a server that both do IRCv3 properly — Halloy or goguma against Ergo or a soju bouncer.
• Just want it to work on your phone? goguma, still.

A far more exhaustive project-by-project changelog for the same period, which this page draws on for leads, is Ilmari Lauhakangas's IRC technology news round-up. If you want every commit rather than every consequence, read that.