As soon as I get another PC up and running with FreeBSD (maybe sometime this month), I'll try to set up an IRC server on it and set up a zone entry for irc.chronocompendium.com. It's not like we'd have an incredible number of chatters, so the bandwidth usage shouldn't be that much.
Speaking of which, it'd save a lot of bandwidth if the IRC protocol were gzip compressed, but both the server and the client would have to support such a feature.