The Open and Free Technology Community aims to provide stable and effective collaboration services to members of the community in any part of the world, while closely listening to their needs and desires.

OFTC was founded at the end of 2001 by a group of experienced members of the Open Source and Free Software communities aiming to provide these communities with better communication, development, and support infrastructure.

OFTC is a member project of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.

You can reach the OFTC IRC network by using a traditional IRC Client of choice, or by the WebChat that we provide. The webchat enables you to connect to the network and chat directly from within your browser.

Connection Details:

• ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697 for SSL (alternative port: 9999), IPv4 and IPv6.
• irc://irc.oftc.net:6667 for non-SSL (alternative ports: 6668-6670, 7000), IPv4 and IPv6.
• SSL is supported on all of our servers. The server certificates are signed by the Let’s Encrypt certification authority. We also publish DNSSEC-signed TLSA records for irc.oftc.net:6697/tcp (see dig _6697._tcp.irc.oftc.net tlsa).
• See CertFP for how to configure client certificate-based NickServ identification.
• If you need to force IPv4, connect to ircs://irc4.oftc.net:6697 .
• We offer a WebChat service (also via the boxes at the top of this page).
• Use of Tor is permitted to irc.oftc.net or our onion service on ircs://oftcnet6xg6roj6d7id4y4cu6dchysacqj2ldgea73qzdagufflqxrid.onion.
• We offer IRC services (NickServ, ChanServ) for nick and channel registration.

If you have support requests regarding the operation of the network please stop by #oftc or email support@oftc.net. We welcome issues and pull requests on our GitHub projects, especially on the issue tracking repository.