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Currently, biboumi derives the host name to use to connect to an IRC network from the JID, like this: #channel%hostname@biboumi.example (it uses the hostname part).

Normally, this is fine, since IRC networks provide well-known host names with DNS round-robin, possibly geolocated etc. magic to provide each client with a working server.

However, sometimes servers and/or networks are weird and it’s not possible to connect to some servers of the network, greatly deteriorating user experience. In that case, the classic resort is to find a server for a network which "just works" and uses that. With biboumi, instead of e.g. #foo%irc.somenetwork.net@… (with irc.somenetwork.net being the well-known entry point of somenetwork) we would now use #foo%some.server@… (with some.server being an IRC server which is part of somenetwork.

Now if some.server breaks down, we have the issue that to change to a different server (while staying on the same network), we would have to change all JIDs we use on the client side. That is inconvenient.

A possible solution would be to allow to specify a list of host names and/or IP addresses for biboumi to connect to via the Ad-Hoc interface on irc.somenetwork.net@…. We would then have used that to configure some.server as the only option to connect to irc.somenetwork.net; if that server fails, we can easily exchange it for another working server.

Compatibility: In the absence of such a configuration, biboumi could resort to the current way of doing things.

A next step would be to pre-configure well-known IRC networks with their entry points like this:

• ircnet@biboumi.example -> open.ircnet.net
• oftc@biboumi.example -> irc.oftc.net
• ...