I'm just not comfortable entering rooms that have 50 active users and 900 lurkers anymore. You can think you're fairly anonymous but when you start having the casual conversations that IRC can lead to and a lurker is logging each users text into separate buckets they'll eventually be able to infer quite a bit about you over the 5+ years you're around casually chatting. I really started to turn negative toward it (especially efnet/dalnet) when I started noticing that toxic users would basically create profiles of other users to use for trolling, blackmail or whatever else was on their imagination at the time. I dealt with a lot of user drama as an ircop on a large network. I'm in a few community slacks and discords nowadays but I'm not a frequent user there either. Between the insular cliques and the fact that I can look up archives of 20-25 year old messages I wrote on there because you never know who or where someone is writing logs really turned me off as I got older. I started using IRC around age, I dunno, 10-12 (30s now), lots of efnet then freenode, at one point I was an ircop until our childish antics got our server desynced. This is what I have loaded (they are all on the weechat scripts site, just google the filename and edit.py I am using a fair number of plugins though. And I'll do some work on packaging it up so it's easy to take the bits that people like. I will write a blog post about how to achieve my setup for linux users since there seems to have been mild interest. There are also Quake-like terminal emulators that drop down on hotkey- these are also quite common and can make it really easy to just check what's going on when you have a spare second. I have a highlight buffer script which keeps a history of all the times I get mentioned, and weechat supports libnotify so if your desktop is able to get pop-ups then you will be notified on highlight. What you're requesting is actually the normal way most of the people I talk to use IRC. I think this is a fair ask, unfortunately I made my setup for me and it's not exactly designed to be packaged/reused, but I linked my configs (in tarball format) here:

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