What a wonderful site!

[(V)/\><]

The company would be inclined to do anything that would make the site more popular, advertising or no. The big problem is there is no way to police it. Anything that is in our name requires that we maintain some type of behavioral standard

I suppose that is a very fair point. Still a shame though. IMO. It was policed before, albeit in a biased manor. Also it was only AO's name on the line, and not the new improved JupAO ... what with it's higher standard bar and all.

1. IRC is very much passe as far as today's net is concerned.
2. There have been numerous attempts to recreate an AO IRC but all have died due to general apathy.
3. This is an international site, so anything that was not open 24/7 would die very quickly.
4. Professional IT sites don't have chatrooms............ this is AO not AOL
5. IRC is ephemeral, and therefore, irrelevant. Professional discussion sites must have some permanence so the contents get indexed and can be looked up.

1. I don't think IRC was ever really in fashion, at least where the corporate world is concerned - unless it is internal only. Besides, catering to fashion is not a good idea imo. I once read ``fashion, the only form of beauty so ugly it has to be reinvented every 6 months''.
2. Without official support they are all going to fail I would say, and official support won't be sanctioned because of the potential for IRC to tarnish the name. If you can't wave the banner you might as well just follow ``your crew'' into quakenet or wherever the cool kids are hanging out these days.
3. Aye. It would have to be open 24/7. I've never heard of closing hours for IRC.
4. Many professionals use IRC. I'm sure IRC fanboys would take serious exception to the AOL comment.
5. I couldn't disagree more with your logic here. That is, if I'm reading it correctly. Are you saying that the IRC technology is no longer relevant ... and the technology is short lived? Or any given network/server/channel?

And speaking of permanence, does this site have infinite retention? Or are old posts rotated out eventually?

IRC is permanent when you consider the user logs. I've often found using grep very useful for searching for information in a conversation I had years back as long as I can remember something relevant to what I'm looking for.

However it is a nightmare to index and organize and get online in website format.

No, sorry. I'm just a coder. Most of the time the only tool I use is notepad

I had some annoying experiences with notepad. I was writing some 68K and notepad kept inserting weird characters that stopped my programs from compiling. So I switched to edit. I mainly use Vim now though.