diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 7d6ca4e3d4..f4e82cb047 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ without arguments starts a full interactive Python console.
   of texts (such as tables). New `justify` bool. Old `justify_kwargs` remains
   but is now only used to pass extra kwargs into the justify function.
 - Improve performance of `find` and `objects` commands on large data sets (strikaco)
+- New `CHANNEL_HANDLER_CLASS` setting allows for replacing the ChannelHandler entirely.
 
 
 ## Evennia 0.9 (2018-2019)
diff --git a/evennia/comms/channelhandler.py b/evennia/comms/channelhandler.py
index e33a95ed5a..feea9f6e33 100644
--- a/evennia/comms/channelhandler.py
+++ b/evennia/comms/channelhandler.py
@@ -29,6 +29,10 @@ from evennia.utils.logger import tail_log_file
 from evennia.utils.utils import class_from_module
 from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _
 
+# we must late-import these since any overloads are likely to
+# themselves be using these classes leading to a circular import.
+
+_CHANNEL_HANDLER_CLASS = None
 _CHANNEL_COMMAND_CLASS = None
 _CHANNELDB = None
 
@@ -314,5 +318,6 @@ class ChannelHandler(object):
             return chan_cmdset
 
 
-CHANNEL_HANDLER = ChannelHandler()
+# set up the singleton
+CHANNEL_HANDLER = class_from_module(settings.CHANNEL_HANDLER_CLASS)()
 CHANNELHANDLER = CHANNEL_HANDLER  # legacy
diff --git a/evennia/settings_default.py b/evennia/settings_default.py
index 8216c13395..674aeee4be 100644
--- a/evennia/settings_default.py
+++ b/evennia/settings_default.py
@@ -446,10 +446,17 @@ COMMAND_DEFAULT_MSG_ALL_SESSIONS = False
 COMMAND_DEFAULT_HELP_CATEGORY = "general"
 # The default lockstring of a command.
 COMMAND_DEFAULT_LOCKS = ""
-# The Channel Handler will create a command to represent each channel,
-# creating it with the key of the channel, its aliases, locks etc. The
-# default class logs channel messages to a file and allows for /history.
-# This setting allows to override the command class used with your own.
+# The Channel Handler is responsible for managing all available channels. By
+# default it builds the current channels into a channel-cmdset that it feeds
+# to the cmdhandler. Overloading this can completely change how Channels
+# are identified and called.
+CHANNEL_HANDLER_CLASS = "evennia.comms.channelhandler.ChannelHandler"
+# The (default) Channel Handler will create a command to represent each
+# channel, creating it with the key of the channel, its aliases, locks etc. The
+# default class logs channel messages to a file and allows for /history.  This
+# setting allows to override the command class used with your own.
+# If you implement CHANNEL_HANDLER_CLASS, you can change this directly and will
+# likely not need this setting.
 CHANNEL_COMMAND_CLASS = "evennia.comms.channelhandler.ChannelCommand"
 
 ######################################################################