I recently tried to setup Soju which is an IRC Bouncer with Pidgin 2 and ran into some issues that might trip up others so figured it they’re worth mentioning here.
Errata
Due to some implementation details, Pidgin 2 and other libpurple2 based clients are incompatible with Soju’s multiple connection support. That is where you add an @identifier to the end of the username.
Purple 2’s IRC support joins the username and server name with an @ which means the username then looks like <soju username>/<soju network>@<soju identifier>@<soju hostname>. So instead of trying to connect to soju hostname the IRC protocol plugin attempts to connect to soju identifer which is obviously wrong. We can’t exactly fix this in Purple 2, but Purple 3 will not be affected by this as we’re phasing out that implementation detail.
Account Creation
Creating the account isn’t too bad, but there are a few things to note. First, your nick name, which should be input in the username field need to include the Soju network name of the network you want to connect to. In the screen shot below I’m telling Soju that I’m using the grim Soju account and want to connect to irc.libera.chat.
In the server field, we now need to specify the Soju address instead of the normal IRC network address.
Before we add the account, we also need to set some advanced settings. Most Soju setups are using TLS by default and Pidgin 2 is setup to connect in clear text by default.
To change this, you need to change the port to proper port for Soju, this is usually 6697. You will also need to make sure the Use SSL option is checked. In the past, TLS was called SSL and the Pidgin 2 interface was never updated for that change.
You may also want to adjust the SASL settings but that depends on your particular setup.
At this point you should be able to hit add and with any luck you’ll connect successfully!