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nimb
NIMB IRC Matrix Bridge (NIMB) is a simple client tool that bridges IRC and Matrix channels and forwards messages from one to others
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matterbridge
bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocketchat, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix, microsoft teams, nextcloud, mumble, vk and more with REST API (mattermost not required!)
I have had my own share of problems with both portalled rooms as well as plumbed rooms on Matrix. Dropped messages, dropped connections, etc. Sometimes the re-connection times can be several hours long. Despite these problems, the portalled rooms have been a convenient way for many IRC beginners to quickly set up a relatively persistent connection to the IRC network via the Matrix bridge. That convenience is now going to be lost unless the IRC channel operators opt-in to set up a plumbed room on Matrix and sufficiently advertise the plumbed rooms.
As a channel moderator, I haven't been too happy with the plumbed channels either. For example, one of the things I have found to be a little problematic is that the Matrix bridge service joins the Matrix room with Admin power level. To avoid these complications, I wrote my own tiny script to bridge the Matrix rooms and IRC channels I needed. Since my script joins the networks as regular clients, it does not need elevated privileges in the channels/rooms. In case, anyone is interested in the script, I have it available here: https://github.com/susam/nimb
The section "Differences from Matrix Appservice" at the bottom of the README in the preceding link explains some of the inconveniences I faced with the Matrix bridge service for plumbed channels and why I had to write my own script to avoid them.
As a user, this is miserable. Matrix is used as a decentralised bouncer for tens of thousands of users to access IRC (including me) and while the bridge has certainly had problems over the years (e.g. occasional delays & a recent spate of dropped messages), it's also improved loads too - e.g. with support for restarting the bridge without reconnecting all the IRC users (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...) and all the other stuff in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/blob/dev....
By now requiring users to go and contact chanops to ask them to explicitly plumb IRC channels to Matrix, it's just going to waste time for chanops, precipitate weird cross-plumbing failures, or fail outright (given plumbing channels with more than 100 users has to be done manually to prevent abuse).
It's very unfortunate that it's come to this, and I can only hope that the whole "opt in with a chanmode" thing happens.
In fact, wouldn't it have been better to just ban the bridge by default, and let chanops unban it if they want people to be able to access via Matrix, rather than encourage people into the weird world of plumbing?
We use matterbridge to bridge IRC to matrix at https://tetaneutral.net
https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge