Right, I've been waiting for thisWhy try to reinvent the wheel when the end result would be nothing as good?Please excuse the length of this post as I want to make sure I cover a majority of factors :
IRC is getting old in the tooth. No uniform way of displaying colours, no uniform ways of playing sound, no font control, no HTML formatting , no easy way to tie in user administration to an existing authentication mechanism (like VBulletins).
An AJAX chat system would be far easier to extend/modify with PGD specific features (link to peoples profiles, profile-images etc)
An IRC room would require an extensive and complex bot written just to do barely any of these things plus It's not good relying on external dependencies that you can't control. The bot crashes on an empty room? you could potentially loose the room.
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Check out AJAX chat, as a system for people to chat with its far more attractive than an IRC session, it fits very well with VBulletin, you can post images, use BBCode, it's easily extended to support embedding YouTube videos, special formatting for code-snippets etc
As a user experience it's far superior and as an admin experience (from the perspective of current administrative duties) doubley so.
IRC is instantly an issue for people that don't know how to use it, is filled with spam bots and script-kiddies of the worst kind (they think they're in some way 'L337' because they've downloaded some script that writes their name in big ASCII Art fonts)
AJAX Chat is instantly usable with no previous experience and is also very familiar to anyone that's used a forum (like all of the PGD members).
It will require pretty much zero admin because it's already covered in existing VBulletin processes and in turn will be restricted to members without having to write a custom bot to take care of the room.
IRC only trumps Ajax chat in two areas : Vast numbers of rooms/users and File Transfer. Neither of which are needed in this scenario and certainly not worth abandoning all the modern benefits for.
My apologies for attacking anyones beloved IRC but I just don't see it as the best potential solution to the above proposition. Peoples love of IRC stems from it's long history and it's status as the domain of warez and HAXORZ. lulz.
It's got nothing to do with it actually being the best chat solution.
Just look up any 'Talker' or 'MUD', they're all far better than IRC with far more features, better commands etc while still being used by telnet clients or IRC-like MUD clients.
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But wait! there's more!
An IRC client requires a direct TCP connection so instantly will not work on any network that does not allow this. That includes most peoples work places, libraries, internet cafes and many public WIFI networks. AJAX Chat works over standard HTTP and will function quite happily through any proxy server.
Anywhere you can browse the web, AJAX Chat will work.
And finally, the number of devices that have web-browsers is far greater than the number that you can install an IRC client on plus there are *many* devices that do not support Java in a webpage (for a Java IRC Client).
Some examples include Web enabled TVs, numerous phones (Including the IPhone), Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3.
Although granted, you can get IRC clients for the IPhone/IPad you'd still be throwing out many devices by using IRC.
Why restrict anyone at all just to use an old 90s chat system when you can choose to restrict nobody and get a bunch of modern features as well?
+1 For AJAX Chat.
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