Weechat in tmux/screen with a bouncer is fantastic. Weechat has a ton of scripts like highlight monitoring, filtering of join/part/quit that you can customize for timeouts. Has a great support channel on freenode too.
If you're doing FOSS projects, you can probably get your way around a command line enough to install and run both of these in a $3 VPS or even an AWS instance.
I'm starting to see slack repeaters in IRC channels all around IRC and I am leaving those channel as it ruins my IRC settings and makes things confusing. My colored nicknames no longer work. It splits communities and makes people leave the channel.