Numerous times over the past 15 years, IRC over SSL has been the easiest way I was able to connect to IRC networks at all when a network operator had a blanket

Numerous times over the past 15 years, IRC over SSL has been the easiest way I was able to connect to IRC networks at all when a network operator had a blanket ban on IRC traffic and/or the common IRC ports. These were mostly public wifi networks, and networks run by large institutions that were probably just trying to protect themselves and their users from botnet traffic, the same way they wouldn't let your compromised computer run a spam server. They were not malicious, but were weighing the costs to niche users against the benefits to their network. VPNs and proxies could also obviously work, but introduce their own difficulties.