'chan' parameter, and pre-populating the form with the channel set

[harry-wood]

In our cgiirc set-up with multiple channels available in a drop-down (Drop-down on the initial form before entering the chat screen), I'd like to be able to share a URL which pre-populates the 'Channel' value.

To my delight I found there is a parameter which does just that! The chan parameter.

...except it doesn't work. It pre-populates the value in the form, but then when we click through we end up connected to the default channel.

[harry-wood]

The actual instance I'm looking at is OpenStreetMap's . So I'm trying to set "chan" like this: https://irc.openstreetmap.org/?chan=osm-gb [update] irc.openstreetmap.org no longer uses CGI:IRC (partly because of this issue)

I could have a go at fixing this myself. Seems pretty simple but...

Can someone who is familiar with the design of this thing, acknowledge this as an issue / offer any thoughts?

I'm a bit confused about the design. With this param passed, it pre-populates the value in the form, but with the field disabled. Why disable it? What is the usage pattern we're expecting for parameters like this? Which aspects of this should be under control of the end-user on the form, end-user via URL params, or administrator config?

I think the "login form" section here: http://cgiirc.org/docs/custom.php documents this a bit, but those links are all dead, making it pretty unclear.