Moving webchat to Kiwi IRC

Hi all,

after years of providing our good old qwebirc based webchat, we are excited to announce that freenode is moving to a new Kiwi IRC based solution!

The change will occur during this weekend (June 22nd / 23rd).

Kiwi IRC is an extensible and modern webchat solution, making IRC a lot easier and more comfortable to use for both newcomers and long time users. In addition to a clean and friendly UI it supports translations into various languages, easier formatting and usage of emoji and advanced customization for power users.

Most existing links and bookmarks should continue to work, including sites embedding the freenode webchat; please do let us know if you are running into issues.

We would like to thank everybody who supported us during this migration, most of all Kiwi's developer, prawnsalad, who provided a huge amount of code, adaptations, options and testing that should ensure a smooth migration.

Along with this change, we will no longer apply gateway cloaks to users of our webchat, treating them the same as any other client. While channel operators will still be able to recognize them via the realname field, we strongly suggest that you carefully consider the impact on legitimate users and hope that you decide not to ban webchat users as a whole.

Please note that the old webchat will no longer be available after this migration.

Thank you for using freenode, via our new Kiwi webchat or any other client you prefer!