I think I've figured out how to tell the game to auto-enable the IRC. If it works, I'll make it a separate Workshop addon - but putting this into ABEM is something I'd rather do directly or not at all.

With that in mind, there are a few questions that need to be answered:

1. When turned on, should the IRC connect to a separate channel for ABEM, in addition to the default 'starruler' channel?

2. More importantly, should the default setting for the IRC to be to automatically enable itself, or should this be an opt-in instead of an opt-out option?

The poll stays open until 0.4.0 comes out of testing, and I'm going to go with 'yes' on both counts until told otherwise.