IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and web client installed

Part of the Synchronet telnet BBS I have setup (web access at https://bbs.kn6q.org) includes an IRC Server.  I wasn't ever particularly big into IRC (except for a little while on the VAX mainframe in college in about 1995).  After that, I would use it occasionally particularly when people who wrote/used/supported some piece of software were available in IRC – in the late 90s and early 2000s when IRC was in it's heyday that was a really popular thing to do.  Honestly, it's doubtful I've used it in the last decade at all.

Given that, I wasn't in any big hurry to light up the IRC Daemon on my Synchronet BBS- but I finally got around to setting it up at kn6q.synchro.net:6667 and linked it into the Synchronet IRC network that lives at irc.synchro.net:6667 .  It's pretty cool, most all the devs and many sysops hang out in #Synchronet channel.

The BBS itself has a really good built in IRC client that works really well and is much like the text based VAX client I used in the old days.  However, I also wanted a dedicated web based client that I could connect to and just let it hang out.

What I settled on was installing The Lounge on my webserver.  What's great about how it works is it's not only a web IRC client but it also acts a "Bouncer" - the software maintains a persistent connection to my IRC server and logs the chat of the channels that I'm joined to even when I'm away.  I log into the web client at https://irc.kn6q.org from any computer or mobile device, and it picks it up like I've never left.

Just like my Ghost CMS , it runs on Node.js so all I needed to do was install the NPM package in the Windows command line, edit the config file and set it up behind the reverse proxy.  

I think it's a pretty cool modern way to do IRC, for what it's worth from someone who was never really "into" IRC.