IRCX is an extension to the IRC

Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

 protocol, developed by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

.

IRCX defines ways to use SASL

Simple Authentication and Security Layer

Simple Authentication and Security Layer is a framework for authentication and data security in Internet protocols. It decouples authentication mechanisms from application protocols, in theory allowing any authentication mechanism supported by SASL to be used in any application protocol that uses...

 authentication to authenticate securely to the server, channel properties/metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

, multilingual support that can be queried using the enhanced "LISTX" command (to find a channel in your language), an additional user level (so there are three levels: owners, hosts, and voices), specific IRC operator levels, and full support for UTF-8

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

 (in nicknames, channel names, and so on). IRCX is fully backwards compatible with IRC; the new features are downgraded to something a standard IRC client can see (and UTF-8 nicknames are converted to hexadecimal).

IRCX was originally supported on Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...

 5.5 (in place of the old Microsoft Chat

Microsoft Chat

Windows Chat is a simple LAN-based text chatting program included in the Windows NT-line of operating systems, including Windows NT 3.x, 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. It utilizes the NetBIOS session service and NetDDE. Users can chat with each other over a LAN or the...

 protocol, which is a binary protocol) and a module was available for Microsoft Exchange 2000.

Microsoft has since stopped distributing software that supports IRCX, and morphed its protocol into the protocol used on the MSN Chat

MSN Chat

MSN Chat was the Microsoft Network version of IRCX , which replaced Microsoft Chat, a set of Exchange-based IRCX servers first available in the Microsoft Comic Chat client, although Comic Chat was not required to connect.- History :Client CompatibilityAccording to the MSN Chat website, the...

 network, which was not standardized or openly available for use (however, its usage was very similar to IRCX and therefore most IRCX clients were able to connect to MSN Chat without much modification). MSN Chat closed on the 16 October, 2006.

Microsoft started to put IRCX through a standardisation process with the IETF by publishing 4 Internet Draft

Internet Draft

Internet Drafts is a series of working documents published by the IETF. Typically, they are drafts for RFCs, but may be other works in progress not intended for publication as RFCs. It is considered inappropriate to rely on Internet Drafts for reference purposes...

s of their protocol, but the standard was never ratified. Because of this, every IRCX implementation bases itself on these draft papers, of which version 4 is the latest.

External links

• IRCX Draft The latest IRCX draft in DocBook
  DocBook
  DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation....
  
  format
• TesX Server Free, Open Source, Platform independent IRCX server
• ignitionServer
• OfficeIRC Server (Project last updated 2009)
• pyRCX (Project no longer being updated. No Server download or source Code)