Instead of doing fancy lstrip or brutalist slicing, just urlencode the entire channel name

gen_stats

@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env python3
 import requests, json
 import xml.etree.ElementTree as xml
+from urllib.parse import quote
 
 WORK_DIR = "/var/www/tilde.chat"
 r = requests.get("http://localhost:8081/stats")
@@ -41,7 +42,7 @@ for schannel in schannels:
     ):
         continue
 
-    channel["webchatlink"] = "https://web.tilde.chat/?join=" + channel["name"][1:]
+    channel["webchatlink"] = "https://web.tilde.chat/?join=" + quote(channel["name"])
 
     channels.append(channel)