xchat and DSL router woes

I've had some problems with xchat when working at home. This is on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid).

I lurk on irc.freenode.net's #erlang channel (sometimes I ask embarrassingly newbie questions).

The first issue (backwards from the title) is that my home DSL router (provided by my ISP) is crap (but I don't replace it because it's free). The DSL-604T has some sort of issue with some ip_conntrack settings being too low, so that when it receives too many incoming connections at the same time or within a short amount of time (e.g., when running a peer-to-peer client, or when in the #erlang channel, apparently, although I don't understand why that is) then the router hangs and I need to power-cycle it.

There are firmware upgrades for this model, but I can't upgrade the firmware since it might then stop working with my ISP (the ISP has custom firmware in there).

This isn't even about running peer-to-peer, it's about an IRC channel about a programming language!

So I solved that by setting up screen to open an ssh session (at screen #9) to do an auto-port-forward to my work computer. ssh -L 8001:irc.freenode.net:8001 my_work_computer. Then I just have xchat connect to localhost:8001. It's simpler than figuring out how to NAT requests to port 8001 through my work computer and cheaper on bandwidth than running xchat in vnc at work (my ISPs bandwidth caps have increased by a factor of 3 since i first whined about the caps, but I still hit the limit before the end of the month).

So then I remembered that xchat on ubuntu sucks because there's no graphical way to turn off join and parts messages. And on a channel with a lot of lurkers (like #erlang), there are a lot of those.

A quick google search shows that the thing to do is

/set irc_conf_mode 1

And I can have that done automatically by:
Xchat|Network List|Select Network|Edit

and setting the Connect command to "/set irc_conf_mode 1".
It'd be nice if it were settable in the graphical interface, but
since it isn't, this is a neat workaround.