The IRC thing is such a nice enhancement that I wrote a relay bot for it (kind of a meta-bot): https://github.com/neckro/OCTOTROG

I'm part of a small sub-community of players, and we use it to filter the announcements so we only see the players we care about, run queries on the Crawl bots without disrupting ##crawl, etc.

(edit: oh hi grimgrin, didn't notice it was you :)