Welcome to OFTC!

The Open and Free Technology Community aims to provide stable and effective collaboration services to members of the community in any part of the world, while closely listening to their needs and desires.

OFTC was founded at the end of 2001 by a group of experienced members of the Open Source and Free Software communities aiming to provide these communities with better communication, development, and support infrastructure.

OFTC is a member project of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.

Connecting

You can reach the OFTC IRC network by using a traditional IRC Client of choice, or by the WebChat that we provide. The webchat enables you to connect to the network and chat directly from within your browser.

Connection Details:

• irc://irc.oftc.net:6667

  • Alternative ports: 6668-6670, 7000
• Connectivity over both IPv4 and IPv6 is available
  • For IPv6 connections, supply a flag in your client if your operating system's preference isn't IPv6

  • If you're on a broken dual stack and can only use IPv4, connect to irc://irc4.oftc.net:6667

• SSL is enabled on all servers, the port for connecting is 6697
  • Alternative port: 9999

• -- or alternatively -- connect using our WebChat

If you're unable to connect via the default ports please use one of the alternate ports: for normal unencrypted connections use ports 6668-6670 or port 7000, for SSL encrypted connections use port 9999.

We support SSL on all our servers. The certs are signed, indirectly, by SPI's certification authority. You can get the root certificate at the SPI website under http://www.spi-inc.org/ca/spi-cacert.crt, and if you care you can verify it using the pgp-signed fingerprints. Alternatively, install a certificate collection (ca-certificates or similar names are common) that includes it.

If you have support requests regarding the operation of the network please stop by  #oftc  or email  support@oftc.net 

News

2013

March

• A webchat has been lurking in the shadows for some time, and is now being announced to the world at large. Visit WebChat for more information.

2012

November

• On November 26th, OFTC enabled automatic cloaking for those who wish to use it, please see UserCloaks for more information and caveats.

• The 2012 staff election is now over and counted. You can review the staff changes on the Staff page.

January

• On January 18th, a bug in anti-spambot software we are using mistakenly kicked a large number of legitimate users from the network. The bug has been fixed, and we apologize for the incovenience caused.

2011

November

• The 2011 staff election is now over and counted. You can review the staff changes on the Staff page.

2010

October

• The 2010 staff election is now over and counted. You can review the staff changes on the Staff page.

May

• oftc-ircservices-1.4.0 has been released, this includes the much anticipated GroupServ module to make it easy for groups to manage multiple channel access lists with centralized group management

April

• We have two new staff members, welcome aboard mwalling and youam!

2009

October

• The 2009 staff election is now over and counted. You can review the staff changes on the Staff page.