[arg_discuss] Weekly IRC Chat Tomorrow

[Adam Martin]

On the one hand, IRC is free, simple, everyone who's been in one of
our chats already has it setup, and "it works". There's some things to
like too - no admin needed, no registration / account creation, etc.
In general, it seems to be a relatively tiny barrier to participation
compared to some of our other challenges.

On the other hand, if - as Mike points out - people can't run IRC
clients *at all* and so are being barred from our chats, then if we
can easily do something to fix that we should.

As far as I'm aware, for *almost* everyone right now, the situation is
"it works", and given how little volunteer admin resource we've got
I'd be afraid of trying to fix something that isn't substantially
broken. If there's anyone who can't get in right now, is there
something we could add to the WIKI instructions on joining the IRC
channel? There's already a web-based client on there, is that not good
enough?

(if anyone can improve on those instructions, that would be awesome -
edit link here:
http://www.igda.org/wiki/index.php?title=Alternate_Reality_Games_SIG/IRC_Chats/IRC_Instructions&action=edit
).

Going forward, we should keep an eye out for good replacements for
IRC, and like Mike says that could be something we transition to in
the future.