SEIRC -- a Stack Exchange Chat <-> IRC proxy

SEIRC is a simple proxy, written in python, that translates between IRC traffic to an IRC client, and HTTP traffic to the Stack Exchange Chat servers. This means you can connect to, and chat on, any Stack Exchange chatroom using your IRC client. It does not act as a bot, passing messages back and forth between IRC and Stack; there's no need for a separate IRC server. Rather, it logs into Stack as you and then pretends to be an IRC server for the convenience of your client.

Limitations

This is something I hacked together in an afternoon. There are probably lots of things it doesn't support, or supports badly. But the basics of chatting and receiving chat messages work.

It doesn't display backscroll from previous chatting in the channel.

It also doesn't have any sort of configuration knobs or command line flags, yet.

Also, it currently echoes all traffic it receives to stdout, including your password. Don't use this anywhere someone malicious could read its output.

Prerequisites

• Python 2.7
• ChatExchange 0.0.3 (installable via pip)
• A StackExchange account with a password

Adding a password to your SE account

If you habitually log in to SE using another authentication provider, like Google or Steam, your SE account may not have a password. In that case, here's how to add a password:

• Log out of SE
• Go to the SE login screen
• Click 'forgot password'
• Enter the email you registered with
• Wait for the email telling you that your SE account doesn't have a password set to arrive
• Click the link in the email and set a password

Running the proxy

Just python seirc.py. It should start up and tell you what port it's listening on.

If you want to change the settings (connect to a different chat backend, listen on a different port or interface), right now you have to do that by editing those settings in seirc.py; they're right under all the imports.

Connecting to it

Configure your IRC client as follows:

• server: localhost:7825 (unless you changed those settings)
• nick: whatever you want
• username: your Stack Exchange account email
• password: your Stack Exchange account

And then connect. The proxy will use your IRC username and password to log in to Stack, and your nick for the name it displays for you in IRC. (Users in Stack will see whatever your configured display name is there.)

Joining channels

At the moment, you can't join channels by name; the Stack client library doesn't have any way to look up a channel by name, only by ID. (This may not be possible in general; Stack channels aren't guaranteed to have unique names, nor to keep one name for their lifetime).

To figure out what the ID of a channel is, visit it in your browser; the URL will be something like http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/<number>/<name>. The <number> is the room ID. /join that from IRC and away you go. The proxy will look up the channel and create a corresponding IRC channel with an appropriate name.

For example, to join Sandbox, you'd see that the URL is http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1/sandbox, type /join 1 in IRC, and find yourself in #sandbox on IRC a moment later.

You can join multiple channels at once in the usual manner, e.g. /join 1,35.

For some reason autojoin, at least on weechat, doesn't work properly with SEIRC; weechat never sends the JOIN command. Possibly it's waiting for a numeric that SEIRC doesn't send yet. Setting /join as the on-connect command, however, does work.

Chatting

• Stack names are translated into IRC-style nicks without whitespace.
• Edits display the changed part of the message, surrounded with some context from the original message; if the original isn't available it just displays the entire edited message. In either case the message is prefixed with '*'.
• @ hilights work properly. Starting a line with Name: (as is common with tab completion in most IRC clients) will automatically be translated to @Name .
• Links and inline images are displayed wrapped in [brackets].
• Multi-line messages show up as multiple IRC messages.
• Replies show up as normal @ highlights of the person being replied to, but with the message proper prefixed with [re: …] where the … is the first few words of the message being replied to.

TODO

• * and _ render as italic in SE, but not in IRC
• IRC formatting characters sometimes don't get passed to SE properly
• Channel topic
• Support replies from inside IRC
• Support configuration settings