I'm not necessarily suggesting you change your architecture, but perhaps more for the benefit of others who might be considering a similar undertaking (a passive CB bot): Rather than rely on IRC (let alone X, which clearly shouldn't be necessary for a task like this), I recommend horking CB content from one of the "cb history" sites, i.e. cb60 (and as backup, cbhistory). Just hork and parse, and you're done. (I can provide code for this, if anybody wants it.) The major downside is that there can be a noticeable delay between when someone talks in the cb and when the stats are updated to reflect it. If lower delay times are needed, one can of course fetch the cb xml feed.