The great thing about the "protocols instead of services" design philosophy is that there is nobody to tell you what the "preferred" method is, you just use whatever you prefer.

For infrequent use, perhaps try Freenode webchat: http://webchat.freenode.net/

The "preferred" method is to use some sort of bouncer (znc) along with running a CLI client (irssi, weechat) in a session manager (screen, tmux) on a remote server. Weechat includes its own bouncer, and I would recommend somebody to start with it over irssi. I only fairly recently switched to weechat from znc + irssi because I wanted to try weechat.el as I wasn't happy with the state of using screen in eshell, and I don't have it as configured as my irssi was yet but I'm happy with it. Next up, switching to tmux from screen...

Quassel is also an alternative, for those that prefer a GUI-client

> but lordy knows what the "preferred" method is now.

Who is this 'lordy', and why are they telling you what your preferences are? IRC is just a protocol. You can use the old clients you used to use[1], keep a command line client running in a screen session on some vps[2]some shiny web based client[3], or you can write your own in a couple of days if none of the other options appeal to you. I took the last option[4]

[1] https://hexchat.github.io/ [2] https://irssi.org/ [3] https://kiwiirc.com/ [4] https://eigenstate.org/software/ircmyr

"Preferred" way to IRC is to run a client just like you did in your yesteryears. Nothing ever changed.

I've found IRCCloud to be nice. Browser-based.

The first step up people generally make from the webchat is something simple like hexchat, although I don't know what the state of windows binaries is these days. Used to be that you could only get precompiled windows binaries by paying.

I prefer command-line irc from a vps, I use erc because I'm an emacs fella, but I've enjoyed irssi as well. Don't forget to cloak whenever possible!