I never worked with Irc, I have no idea how it works.

Thats the beauty of using a third party like KiwiIRC, you don't need to. Just use the iframe code in a page etc. https://kiwiirc.com/embedding

You can connect to their network or any one you like. I use Freenode or Efnet usually but I find people who use forums don't tend to want to 'chat' much hehe. Just seems to be one of those personality type things ..

The Dark Theme is pure css. Its not ideal because I used a background texture and transparency rather than just plotting it out as solid colours etc. The only other thing is using a simple css wrapper to fix the width etc. Feel free to steal anything you like .. the css is compressed but you can edit css in real time using chrome 'inspect element' etc. Or just copy/paste the css in to something like this: http://cssunpacker.com/ I should warn you its a terrible mess full of hackery and redundant divs etc.

The css mods were dead simple really, it just take a week to find the right combination of colours and font through trial and error. And mainly because I have no idea what I am doing. It takes AGES to get the right shade of grey for the Thread View. A lot of trial and error: http://grognard.sytes.net/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=527 I really, really like it for readability though! Especially on tablets. I was inspired by another MLF site I found: http://www.borussen.net/forum/forum.php

My site is super spartan because its running on a raspberry pi on home broadband and using a sdcard for storage! Mysql/php/apache etc cause all sorts of performance and stability issues. That and we all use tablets to access it from work etc. So web 'design' isnt really important or desired hehe. Still if you off-site all images to picasa (or something) you can reduce you entire page load to < 50kb of gzipped text. Which gives the impression of a super fast forum .. that really isn't. http://grognard.sytes.net/forum/index.php?id=525 is a good example of an image heavy page that loads really 'fast' because its all on google cloud hehe. Since most of our site is walls of text like this: http://grognard.sytes.net/forum/index.php?id=287 the raspberry pi copes just fine. Its really quite snappy for a 2watt $30 device.

Anyway, I've seen way better MLF themes than my terribad efforts lol