miau

If you're looking for a small, fully featured IRC bouncer and IRC proxy, you might want to check out miau. The biggest difference between miau and HTTP-proxy is that when your IRC-client disconnects from bouncer, the connection to the server doesn't necessarily get cut off. This means your nickname can stay online and you won't risk losing it to someone else. Even in case of netsplit or other disruptions, miau can try to retrieve your nick automatically.

Another advantage of using bouncer is that your hostname appearing in IRC will be that of the machine the bouncer is running on, rather than the one you're IRCing from. Miau itself was written on GNU/Linux (i386), but it should compile on most UNIX-platforms.

Here are some key features of miau:

- Permanent connection to IRC-server
- Ability to set user away when client quits and to use user's quit-message as away-message
- Capability to try to retrieve primary nick
- Logging (recent log can be replayed automatically at reconnect like you already had been on the channel)
- Message forwarding
- DCC-bouncing
- Auto-mode (without mode-flood)
- Flood protection
- On-connect sent messages (to keep nickservs etc. happy)
- Ability to survive even if some pings to server are lost
- V-host support
- Preliminary IPv6-support (untested)
- ASCII art cats
- Support for multiple clients (one at home, one at office)
- Permission-chains
- Portable, written in C
- Compiles (at least) on GNU/Linux (i386/StrongARM/Alpha), HP-UX (HP 9000/C3000), SunOS (sun4m/sun4u/sun4c), Digital UNIX (Alpha) and MacOSX (PPC). Not tested on others.
- Small (my miau is about 50 kB on GNU/Linux on i386)
- Most features can be left uncompiled
- Released under GPL

The latest release fixes several issues with Undernet-like servers and improves your chances of staying online in case of netsplit and network problems. Miau has also made the behaviour of the wildcard "*" predictable, although non-greedy.