This is **very much** not production-ready yet. There's `console.log`s all over the place, an inadequate amount of testing and error/bounds checking, several bugs, etc.
That said, it is usable for basic chatting. See the support matrix (pun intended) below for what it can do.
There's a few things "different" from a standard IRC network:
- You can't PM users like normal. Direct messages are notated by the `&` channel prefix. Once joining channels is implemented, you can join the `&` channel and it will auto-invite the user.
- In order to highlight users, you need to prefix their nick with an `@`, so `@emerson: hi`. Reflection automatically expands this to the user's MXID, so even though it's annoying, it's needed to stop inadvertent highlights for now.
It's for people who want to use their IRC client to chat on Matrix. It's like Bitlbee or Matterbridge, but focused specifically on IRC <-> Matrix, as well as being a reference client for IRCv3 specifications.
It's not meant for community use; if you are a homeserver admin and want to allow your users to use IRC, you would be better off with [heisenbridge](https://github.com/hifi/heisenbridge).
### Why are there different channel prefixes?
Because matrix room names are often long and have characters that IRC channel names can't use, Reflection has to attempt to find a suitable IRC equivalent
`#` channels are channels that have a canonical alias for us to use.
`&` channels are two-person channels (either DMs or normal channels).
`!` channels are the room IDs of channels whose names can't be converted into IRC-friendly names.
Note that there are no PMs, because Matrix doesn't differentiate between DMs and normal two-person channels, any channel with two people in it gets marked as a `&` channel.
Authentication is done via `SASL PLAIN`, the username is your mxid and the password is an access token from another session plus your server domain, separated by a `:` (so `access_token:matrix.org` if your server is matrix.org). Note this is the domain for `m.server`, not necessarily the homeserver domain.
## Support
The main chat is `#reflectionircd` on Libera ([webchat](https://web.libera.chat/gamja/?channel=#reflectionircd)), which is available on Matrix as well at [`#reflectionircd:matrix.org`](https://matrix.to/#/#reflectionircd:matrix.org)
