The global announcement has been removed now, but if you'd actually bothered to look through or search the forums you'd have seen that there is a thread in the 'Free Hosting' forum.
I don't think it's that much of an issue for it to be posted in the free-hosting support forum but yeah it would have been a good idea to search for this.
Anyway i think a good idea would be to download your own IRC client then configure it o work with x10, it makes everything much easier .