DIRECT CLIENT-TO-CLIENT INTERNET RELAY CHAT FOR SOFTAP CLIENTS

Systems, methods, and apparatus are herein disclosed for enabling direct communication between two IRC clients without the use of an IRC server once the connection is established. In one instance this can involve a gateway electing to not mangle or not perform NAT on a private IP address of a sending client as a DCC request is passed to the IRC server. In another instance this can involve a gateway mangling or performing NAT on a sender public IP address of a DCC request after it has been passed to the IRC server and returned to the gateway. The clients can be SoftAP clients. The gateway can determine when to mangle and when not to mangle IP addresses using a database that include identifiers of IRC clients on a subnet along with respective IRC servers for those IRC clients.