Something weird, good for a laugh. The server irc.libera.chat and its variants bans me even before I figure out how to join any IRC room. It seemed strange, but a little searching finds out that it is my ISP (not myself) that is blocked, for maintaining an open proxy server: I was referred to some page that gave my IP as 170.39.170.101, so I did a whois lookup, and yup, that address goes back to my ISP, monkeybrains. They have tor servers at: 209.141.41.225 209.141.56.96 209.185.120.173 In an earlier post, under some other topic, I mentioned this. Of course I block all these IP addresses myself, since I don't know why my ISP would maintain Tor servers (for surveillance, or just to be helpful?), but it seems inherently insecure to use these tor servers. Thus I am forced to run Konversation or some other IRC client over Tor. If "they" (whoever "they" are, "out there") wish to prevent bad things from happening on the internet, all it does it encourage more people to use onion links, which is probably good for us users, but maybe not what "they" intended. I did already look up the pages about how to set it up. I created my own self-signed certificate, copied it to the appropriate places, but now I am stumped. I found instructions here for setting up Konversation: https://libera.chat/guides/certfp.html but it might be intended for KDE5's version of Konversation, not for TDE. Also I went through these pages: https://libera.chat/guides/connect#accessing-liberachat-via-tor Other IRC clients, so far, are less user-friendly than Konversation, and I like to stick with Trinity where possible. Also still trying to figure out SASL, and cannot find the public key. I don't know if this is for irc.libera.chat or palladium.libera.chat (which is what their webpage says to use). I followed instructions to configure torrc to use the onion link, but so far no luck. I assume that there must be something basic that I am missing. I've used lots of chat clients like Kopete and Psi-Plus and Pidgin (and Trillian, in Windoze), so I know how to get them to do what I want, but I've never used IRC. Neither Kopete nor Psi-Plus seem to work for me, and ksirc left me unenthusiastic, but I am willing to try whatever works. Any help or suggestions or links are welcome. Bill