We have been running an IRC channel on the Freenode network, #letsencrypt, in addition to the community forums. After careful thought we have decided we can only support one of these platforms.
We feel that the community forum offers a better experience for users looking for help and for discussion of the Let’s Encrypt platform. We’re closing the #letsencrypt IRC channel and focusing our efforts on the community forum.
We believe Discourse offers a better user experience, has more powerful moderation tools, and is less of a time burden for staff than a real-time medium like IRC. We look forward to welcoming IRC users to the Discourse forum.