Thread: Discussion: Restoration Chat on IRC

Since we switched the tuesday restoration chat from the now broken flash to irc it seems like there were some complains.
I was partly involved in the switch over, so I feel responsible to work on getting things to run as smoothly as possible. I'm thinking this thread would be a good way to discuss various options in case we want to change things to make them better.

History:
As the community kept growing the flash chat seems unable to support the sunday chats, so after a brief stint with a php based chat, the main SRP chat got moved over to IRC on at the #srp channel on freenode. This has been fairly used resource and has become a place where newbies pop up 24/7 and can almost always get help. In addition that's where the 'official' sunday night SRP chat is happening.
For a while the old flash chat was used by some die-hards and also for the restoration chat on tuesday night, which is generally small enough that still works with flash.

Now the flash is already disfunctional and the natural place to move the tuesday chat was on freenode.

We chose to have a separate channel dedicated to it because it leaves the main #srp channel free for people who are not interested in restorations, and most importantly newbies who can continue to come and ask whatever questions they may have.
This way it is functionally equivalent to having a separate restoration chat as it was up to this point.

The main complaint seems to be that having two different channels within a single application is confusing. It seems to me that if the restoration conversations are to merge with the rest it will be even more confusing.
The way I see it is that a person either can handle multiple conversations at the same time, or they cannot. Having separate channels allows for a person who falls in the second category to only join one of them. It seems to be simplifying things if anything.
In fact that's one of the reason the tuesday chat was kept in a separate place to start with - so that it gets dedicated to restoraton only and not helping newbies with choosing gear. troubleshooting problems, or just general chit-chat. I was actually surprised to see some of the main advocates for dedicated restoration chat now complain that it is separate from the main one.

One thing that I believe is completely wrong to do is to usurp the #srp channel for restoration talk on tuesdays and forbid non-restoration related chat in it.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to your thoughts on the subject. It's been already 2 weeks with the new system, so any feedback would be good too.