I have never used the IRC groups, hope it is nothing like the mail groups/lists. Hate them with a passion
Rest assured that IRC is nothing like email.
![Sourit :)](https://forum.linuxvillage.org/Smileys/aaron/smiley.gif)
It's a chat room, basically. Here's a chat I had with mélodie about the Anita Borg Institute:
http://irclog.perlgeek.de/crimsonfu/2013-03-28#i_6638794I dunno, I just posted to
http://linuxvillage.net/index.php/topic,241.0 which is already three pages long and I was somewhat annoyed about having to click next a couple times. All I could think was, "this conversation easily could have taken place faster over IRC and would have been easily fit on a single page of logs without people having to click next to read it."
Also, I do understand that SMF (and other forum software) continues to evolve, as mélodie said. I just don't find the user experience of forums satisfying, usually.
The other thing I think a lot about is data liberation. If you click that crimsonfu link above you'll see a line from GitHub191. That's me grabbing the latest IRC logs and storing them on GitHub. The idea here is that I can (and do) pull down the entire history of the logs and grep through them for some conversation I remember. And the logs available for anyone who wants them. I want people to feel confident that if they contribute to an IRC channel of mine, they can get their words, their data, out of it.
Actually, I recently started another IRC channel dedicated to the topic of data liberation and owning your words:
http://spanworm.comThe other problem with forums is that they let me ramble on.
![Clin d'oeil ;)](https://forum.linuxvillage.org/Smileys/aaron/wink.gif)
IRC is more like Twitter. You get maybe twice or three times as many characters per line, but that's it. It focuses people.
![Sourit :)](https://forum.linuxvillage.org/Smileys/aaron/smiley.gif)