The sage IRC channel is #sage-devel on http://freenode.net

From Linux you can chat via a text console by installing "irssi", running it, and typing

  /SERVER add irc.freenode.net
  /SERVER irc.freenode.net
  /join #sage-devel

If you are using Konversation (the KDE IRC client), you can set up an auto-replace rule that lets you type #1322 (for trac #1322) and what everyone sees is http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/1322 (which lets people click on the link and see the bug you are talking about). To configure this, go to Settings -> Configure Konversation -> Behavior -> Auto Replace and create a rule with Find as "#([0-9]+)" and Replace with as "http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/%1" (both without the quotes). You can select whether this rule is applied to incoming posts, your outgoing posts, or both.