[jchw]

This is mostly irrelevant; users using Web IRC gateways, services like IRCCloud or clients like HexChat[1] do not have to configure the server unless it isn’t already present in the list. If they do, they already will have to manually configure either TLS or plaintext. There is no “default.”

I mention SASL because it is relevant to security posture, especially if the user wasn’t connecting via TLS. Although of course the server could allow PLAINTEXT in practice there’s no point in supporting that because IRC already had native plaintext server authentication.

[1]: https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat/blob/3d1d9e1716d66abb6921...