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it's an IRC network aimed at gamers where 98% of channels are public and free for anyone to join without any form of authentication ever.

so you'd be more accurate to say it covers 98/100 of cases, and we leave the other 2 open

the main obstacle these days is that a secure PKI deployment for a network ran by 40 different companies with no legal structure is a hard problem, not the technical challenge of putting a cert in your ircd.conf

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While they are free to join the channels, I'd imagine a great deal of the users authenticate to the nickserver to avoid impersonation and to protect their nick. Without SSL, anybody on their network could potentially sniff their credentials with a lot less trouble than MITM'ing a SSL connection.

So I'd say that it's just not for the 2% that are using the secure channels, but probably for the majority of the userbase that is active for more than a couple of sessions.

QuakeNet has supported challenge response auth for more than 10 years, so this isn't a problem for anyone using that.

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