Yup, looks like that time of year again.

Each year the last couple of weeks before Christmas seem kind of slow around here. People (myself included) just seem to have an awful lot of other things on their plates. Of course, with IB taking a much needed retirement & Moogie in the middle of a move, things are probably going to seem even more quite than usual. I suppose that means that I'll have to take up the slack.

At any rate, to keep people from getting too bored, I'm hoping to have the new website & new forum ready to go by some time next week. I think you guys will like the new forums. They've got some nice new features (we'll be moving from the 2.x vBulletin that we're on to a 3.x version).

In the midst of updating the site & the forums, I've been wondering about our IRC stuff. It doesn't seem to get much use anymore & I'm wondering why. Are people just not interested in live conversations? Is it IRC itself? Perhaps some other means of live chat or maybe just a really good web based IRC client would make things easier.

Personally, I think an embedded window (or a popup window) that logged me into our IRC channel (or some other type of chat room) with my forum name (& maybe my avatar for a graphical chat) anytime I accessed the forums might be neat. Does anyone else have an opinion about this?