May I suggest that we get a modern chat client for the competitions/community? IRC feels horribly dated next to alternatives such as Slack, Discord and Hipchat.
I really like IRC, but I agree that comparing it to Discord ( the only one of the three mentioned that I've used ) it's like night and day. TOTALLY vamped experience and is almost just as easy for anyone to just join in and chat. All the cool features that IRC doesn't have would make it very worth transitioning to. I only fairly recently got into using Discord and it's been a total rework on just how easy it is to join any group out there and have lots of cool and useful features out of the box.
For some reason I'm getting really big deja-vu from this post. Have we talked about this before?
Edit:
A possible reason NOT to use other clients is that AFAIK IRC supports far more systems as it's only a protocol that clients can be made to utilize for universal connectivity, whereas things like Discord is a client & service bundled together and therefore need people to port the client over or the devs need to do so. Then again the client may be open source for all I know and people have already made ports or even alternatives with the main developers' blessing.
Now that you mention it Ninjaboi, it does seem like we may discussed this some time previously.
Personally I'm good with whatever.
It may be a WikiDot issue as to why we're still using IRC (IE: Wikidot doesn't support other stuff.)
"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets
I think PiscesMike has hit the nail on the head. At the time, like 5 years ago, IRC was the only thing that integrated seamlessly into Wikidot. I don't know if that's changed or not, but I'm also willing to entertain the idea of just having a link that takes you off-site.
I definitely agree that IRC is out of date. I'd prefer to use something else. I've been using Slack for a lot of team projects, and I'd love to switch to that. One huge benefit that you get from it is persistent chat, so even if you aren't connected, somebody can leave a message for you and you can see it when you get in.
But I'm not sure if Slack has an option for a public group. One thing I do like about IRC is that you don't have to create an account or anything to get connected. You just start using it. That's a big deal for new people coming in who just want to ask a simple question. If you have to create an account, it's frequently a dealbreaker for them.
So I suppose those are the requirements. Does anybody have a recommendation for a modern chat tool that (a) has persistent chat, and (b) is super easy for new people to jump into?
I'm going to go take a look at some of the ones you listed, Emblis.
So Discord actually looks pretty promising. I was able to create an account without needing to provide an email address or anything. I'd like to confirm that you can use a server without needing to be granted access. Emblis (or anybody else) do you know if that's the way it works? I think I've configured a new server to be as open as possible. Maybe somebody else who doesn't have a Discord account can try jumping into it: https://discord.gg/yXqZStc
We've all been using Discord now for 10 days, and I think we all generally like it. It does seem like that's the direction we're going in the future. I think I want to keep Discord still in "unofficial" status until after the collab this Saturday, but I don't see any reasons right now why we wouldn't make a permanent migration to Discord. Everybody is there already anyway…