@cairnswm: Guess what my suggestion was...

@everybody: Still, now I look at the proposition from a 3rd party standpoint - its not half bad. Even if we don't come up with a revamped IRC protocol which (wait for it) could be legend - a simple chat protocol solves everything: we have the code - pascal as we are now discussing is web capable, and cross platform so Windows, Linux, mac and web/smartphone users are satissfied. Further - its our own protocol: spam wont even know how to access it in the first place, let alone flood it... Although the AJAX chat is nice and yes ticks most of the boxes -I do find it a ruddy big pain in the... workflow (for the record I was going to say workflow) and I hate wasting my resources by having all my 300tabs in firefox open just for a chat page if you know what I mean...