Robust IRC VS ngircd

i dont see the counterpoint here, which company has poured even a fraction of a percent into IRC as Google has with its myriad of messengers or Whatsapp/Telegram et al.

One google engineer on his personal time introduced entirely new systems into IRC (RobustIRC) https://robustirc.net/ which is the most commercial support that exists.

The IRCv3 initiative is a very small number of people, none of them supported commercially.

This won't likely help after the fact but I would suggest separating Artwork discussion into their own Discord server and then move all business partners and certainly financial information discussion with employees into private self-hosted servers so that one has control over the server, chat filters, IP/domain blocks and even approved/denied web links. It's not perfect and some may not be happy about having to register on a second site friction and all but it sounds like in this case it would have helped. Leave cloaking disabled on the business server so you can see where people are connecting from ahead of time and password protect sensitive channels.

Additionally IRC server filters can be updated daily with the most prevalent scam domains using the same sources as uBlock and a few other git mirrors on github. One could even block all text that appears to be any kind of URL and instead require them to get on voice chat to verify themselves. uMurmur is a tiny daemon that is very easy and quick to set up and one can also password protect channels on uMurmur. There is an android client for uMurmur called Mumla.

Take a look at Ngircd [1] and TheLounge as a quick way to set up a private secure chat server in less than 20 minutes. uMurmur [3] takes even less time to set up. All three daemons are available in sever Linux distribution repositories and have example configurations.

[1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

I am pretty sure nobody except nerds knows what IRC is right now. It's long since been supplanted by user-friendlier group chat services.

I agree with this. Like I mentioned this is slowly changing with web front-ends to IRC like TheLounge. NGIRCD [1] + TheLounge [2] take all of about 10 minutes to set up and then maybe another 10 minutes to tie that into and configure IRC services such as Anope. I would not be surprised if this has already been automated with Docker or Ansible. Discord and Slack will probably be popular until they reach critical mass and feel confident enough to start doing hostile things to their user base or until someone with a large ego purchases them.

[1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

Got bored and wanted to muck about with one of my favourite IRC bots (without peeing off my usual haunt' opers). So I compiled ngIRCd and had a bash at running RBot