OFTC

OFTC

The Open and Free Technology Community is a volunteer-run network that aims to provide stable and effective collaboration services to members of the community in any part of the world, while closely listening to their needs and desires.

You can reach the OFTC IRC network by using a traditional IRC Client of choice, or by the WebChat that we provide. The webchat enables you to connect to the network and chat directly from within your browser.

Connect your client to ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697

To connect securely, use ports 6697 or 9999.

TLS/SSL is supported on all servers. Our server certificates are signed by Let’s Encrypt. We also publish DNSSEC-signed TLSA records: dig _6697._tcp.irc.oftc.net tlsa.

Both IPv4 and IPv6 are available.

Use of Tor is permitted to the address above.

You can also connect to the onion service: ircs://oftcnet6xg6roj6d7id4y4cu6dchysacqj2ldgea73qzdagufflqxrid.onion:6697

(Not recommended) To connect without TLS/SSL use ports 6667-6670 or 7000.

IRC services (NickServ, ChanServ) are available for nick and channel registration. See CertFP for how to configure client certificate-based NickServ identification.

Recent News

February 28, 2025

  • The Matrix.org Foundation recently published a blog post stating that unless they raise temporary funding by the end of March, and also solicit further, more sustained funding in the month after that, they will start scaling back operations and discontinue running and maintaining their flagship inter-protocol bridges, including the official bridge to OFTC.

    In the event that they do not meet their ambitious goals, we are providing pointers below to resources so that our users can plan how to proceed, and avoid splitting their communities.

    While there are some forks of the matrix-appservice-irc codebase, we are not aware of any equipped to maintain this as a community fork. However, there are other options, such as Matterbridge which bridges to a variety of other protocols as well, and Heisenbridge which offers a one-to-many bridging option.

    The Matrix.org Foundation has indicated to us that that they will make plans for the worst-case scenario, and we will communicate further as we get more information.

November 01, 2024

  • 2024 staff election results - thanks to Steve McIntyre (Sledge) and Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb) for running the elections as counters this year.

March 23, 2024

  • 2023 staff election results - thanks to Steve McIntyre (Sledge), Alexander Færøy (ahf), and Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb) for running the elections as counters this year.

October 10, 2023

  • 2022 staff election results - They’re a year late, but 2022 election results have been posted. Thanks to Steve McIntyre (Sledge), Alexander Færøy (ahf), and Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb) for running the elections as counters this year.

October 24, 2022

  • OFTC wants to upgrade the services in use to the Atheme variant. One user visible change will be the uniqueness of SSL cert fingerprints for accounts. If you are using SSL CertFP to identify to your accounts, please review the fingerprints associated with your account(s) and ensure that they are not duplicated between your accounts. This only applies if you have multiple separate accounts using the same fingerprint. Linked/grouped nicks are only a single account.

    We intend to remove any remaining duplicate fingerprint entries on 2022-11-22. The removal algorithm will delete duplicates from all but the most recently used account.