mikaela.github.io/_posts/2015-05-18-ircs_links.md

Yet another note-to-self post, but these links are confusing, how do you make proper irc:// or ircs:// link?

I started wondering about the proper way to make irc/ircs links today and based on the following addresses

• 2015-05-18 https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/prov/ircs
• 2015-05-18 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-butcher-irc-url-04

I decide that the correct form which I will use is ircs://irc.example.org:6697/#channel,##channel,!channel.

• specifies that the link uses SSL with the s (for plain text just remove it)
• specifies the port so client doesn’t have to guess it
• clearly specifies the channels without leaving prefixes for the client to guess

The previously linked pages also contain other forms, but this seems the best to me and I am against using channel keys as there are better ways to keep channel private (such as restricted or +i and +I to authorized people) and server passwords aren’t used anywhere where I would encounter them, other than forwarding the password to NickServ, but that is depracted by SASL.