@a1ba The chat in FreeHL's menu does actually work (and tries to be very faithful) and uses IRC underneath. Partially because that avoids me having to have the game open. It may even be the very first IRC client written in QuakeC since we added the ability to open sockets just for that... :S
I also wanted to restore this feature, and it's quite easy without making engine or menu too complicated, especially IRC is easy enough for this, but just never actually implemented it.
By the way, do you also have a working download mods section in Custom Game menu? :)