IRCX

{{short description|Extension to the IRC protocol}}

{{Update |date=June 2024}}

IRCX (Internet Relay Chat eXtensions) is an extension to the Internet Relay Chat protocol, developed by Microsoft.{{cite web

| last = Abraham

| first = Dalen

| title = Extensions to the Internet Relay Chat Protocol (IRCX)

| publisher = IETF

| date = June 1998

| url = http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pfenning-irc-extensions-04

| access-date = 2008-09-04}}

IRCX defines ways to use Simple Authentication and Security Layer authentication to authenticate securely to the server, channel properties/metadata, 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 (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 Server 5.5 (in place of the old Microsoft Chat protocol, which is a binary protocol) and a module was available for Microsoft Exchange 2000.{{cite web

| title = Exchange Chat Features/IRCX

| publisher = Microsoft

| date = April 19, 2004

| url = https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc767140.aspx

| access-date = 2008-09-04}}

Microsoft started to put IRCX through a standardisation process with the Internet Engineering Task Force by publishing 4 Internet Drafts of their protocol.