[crossfire] Improving IRC availability with a chat bridge

[Mark Wedel]

  I should probably transfer ownership of crossfire to someone else - I haven't 
had much time to work on it lately, and seems unlikely that I'll find time 
anytime soon.  But that wasn't really the question here.

  It is hard to argue about making the game (or chat channels) more accessible 
to more people.  There are a few thoughts here:

- Move chat to another system that is more widely used/available, with the 
understanding that it still needs to be accessible to linux users.  So if there 
is a web interface, probably acceptable.  If the only thing is a windows 
program, probably not.

- Set up a gateway.  As noted, this could have issues related to freenode 
policy.  One thought there is to change the topic to clear state that there is a 
gateway being used.  I'm not actually sure how messages would get attributed 
when moved between the 2 chats - I'd imagine there may be a forwarding agent 
string involved.  And handling of private messages would need to be carefully 
done (if one replies to the forwarding agent privately, you probably don't want 
to that appear to all the users on the other chat system)