Chat on Service-Overtchat,
an IRC network of your own
A live chat network: channels, nicknames you protect with a password, and moderation keeping watch. Join from your browser with nothing to install — and if you want one of your own, it all installs at home.
Three steps and you are in
Nothing to install just to chat. The rest comes whenever you want it.
Protect your nickname
Reserve your nickname with a password: anyone wearing it without identifying is warned, then renamed after one minute. Reserve my nickname →
Open a channel
Request your channel, then run it from the website: ranks, greeter bot, settings. Request a channel →
Want to run your own network?
Everything you have just seen — the server, the services, the moderation, the panel — installs on your own machine in a few commands. The rest of this page is for you.
Four building blocks, one chain
Each component has a precise role and depends on the one before it. That order governs installation and operation alike.
IRC server
Overtchat-Hybrid, written for this network and in service since 28 July 2026: the installer lays down its compiled binary, checked against its fingerprint. It can also build UnrealIRCd, ircd-Hybrid, ircu, InspIRCd and Bahamut from their sources, with TLS for clients and a dedicated port for server links.
Eggdrop
The host bot. It provides the Tcl engine, the administration console and the permanent connection to the server; wherever IriX is installed, it runs inside it. On this network, no Eggdrop runs any more: OverCore, written in Node.js, took over its services in October 2026, and IriX has been stopped since 18 October 2026.
Network services
Accounts, channels, automations, moderation, ULine links — carried, in an installation, by IriX Services (Tcl, hosted by Eggdrop) or by OverCore (Node.js). On this network, OverCore has served them since October 2026 — the five services on 9 October, the channels on 10 October —, and IriX has been stopped since 18 October 2026. Nearly 40,000 lines of Tcl backed by MariaDB.
AI moderation
A Bayesian classifier, enabled channel by channel, which learns the vocabulary reported by operators; depending on the mode, it learns, reports to IRCops or sanctions. On this network, it has been frozen since 10 October 2026: the bot that carried it no longer reads the channels, and no message is scored; its settings are kept.
Order matters. IriX is a Tcl module hosted by Eggdrop: it cannot be installed without it. Likewise, Anope and Lea assume an IRC server is already in place. The installation wizard follows this logic and tells you, at each step, what is left to do.
Overtchat-Hybrid, our own IRC server
A server written for this network, in C11, with no mandatory dependency beyond the standard library. It has been serving the network since 28 July 2026: proven side by side, trialled, then put into service without anything changing for you.
Three lineages
The TS6 core comes from ircd-hybrid, block configuration and extbans from UnrealIRCd, strict channel timestamps from ircu. The server-to-server protocol is that of UnrealIRCd 6: the services — IriX yesterday, OverCore today — link to it without a single line of their code changing.
Compound nicknames
Changing your nickname no longer erases the one you connected with: it stays in front, separated by a bar. SerVuS asking for test becomes SerVuS|test, and /nick me gives back the bare nickname. You always know who you are talking to.
Protected nicknames
A nickname can be reserved with a password, given when you connect. Anyone wearing it without identifying is warned, then renamed after one minute; the network robots’ nicknames are refused at connection. Insults and impersonation of staff are refused outright. Passwords are stored in plain text nowhere: only a salted hash is kept, and from a client your password never passes through the website.
In service since 28 July 2026. Overtchat-Hybrid now serves the network. It replaced UnrealIRCd after a side-by-side trial run without a second of downtime — clients connected, five services linked and answering — followed by a switchover lasting a few seconds.
Nothing changes for you: same address, same ports, same certificate. Registered nicknames, channels and permissions are unchanged, and this website’s chat works as before.
The server passes 39 test campaigns, all run against the real binary and real sockets — including two servers actually linked to each other, an encrypted link, and a campaign that runs the Tcl code of the IriX services, the one used by Eggdrop-based installations. What is still not implemented is stated as such in the release notes: SASL, channel history and reverse DNS resolution.
5 services, 5 domains
Injected over the server-to-server link, they appear as users and answer by private message. Their role is derived from their real name, not hard-coded.
| Service | Role | Domain | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| OverTchat | chan | Channel moderation and management | /msg OverTchat INFO #channel |
| OverHub | hub | Network view, counters, globops | /msg OverHub STATS |
| OverNick | nick | Registration and identification | /msg OverNick REGISTER password |
| OverBot | bot | Bots, ops and service messages | /msg OverBot LIST |
| OverWeb | web | Counters for the web interface | /msg OverWeb PING |
OverCore, IriX’s successor, has served these five services since 9 October 2026 — OverHub taken over on 7 October, OverTchat and OverBot on 8 October, OverNick on 9 October. Its own pseudo-client is not counted among them.
What the admin panel does
37 pages to run the platform without opening a terminal or writing an SQL query.
Monitoring
The state of the processes, the server-to-server link and the database at a glance. Counters, event log, disk usage.
Service control
Switch a pseudo-client on or off, edit its identity, restart a link, send a raw command over the server link.
Accounts and ranks
Account creation, rank assignment, forced sign-out, tracking of open sessions.
Moderation
Permanent or time-limited bans, banned words per channel, anti-flood settings, sanction history.
AI engine
Per-channel configuration, a quarantine queue to review, manual training, inspection of the most toxic tokens.
Logs
Filtered viewing of the bot and SQL query logs, with errors and warnings highlighted.
The panel never talks to the IRC server directly. It writes a request to the database; the bot reads it on its next cycle (under thirty seconds) and carries it out. This detour guarantees that an action triggered from the web follows exactly the same path, with the same safeguards, as a command typed on IRC.
Four commands to begin
The installation script detects your distribution, checks the packages and guides you step by step.
# Download the installer served by this site, compare its fingerprint with the one on the Download page, then run it curl -fsSLO https://service-overtchat.hd.free.fr/dl/Bootstrap/overtchat-setup.sh sha256sum overtchat-setup.sh chmod +x overtchat-setup.sh ./overtchat-setup.sh
The project installs into your home directory and its services never run as root. The installer does, however, need root or sudo for packages, systemd units and a few system files (sudoers, log rotation, Apache and Postfix if configured).