IRCX

IRCX (Internet Relay Chat eXtensions) is an extension to the Internet Relay Chat protocol, developed by Microsoft in the 1990s.

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, additional channel privilege levels, specific IRC operator levels, and support for Unicode in nicknames, channel names, and other user-visible strings. IRCX was designed to be backwards compatible with IRC; the specification states that existing IRC clients should continue to function against IRCX servers, while clients supporting the extensions can query the server for IRCX support.

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.

Microsoft published several Internet Draft revisions of IRCX through the Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF Datatracker records revisions 00, 01, 02, and 04. The final revision is classified as an expired individual Internet-Draft; it has no RFC stream or intended RFC status and was not published as an RFC.