I searched around on the forum could see anything for it, but is there an official/unofficial IRC channel for Assembler Games? If there isn't one could easily set one up, I'd say got with the freenode network, its nice and has a nickserv and chanserv so no bots needed. I'd stay far away from the drama that is EFNET. What do you guys think?
Web forums have replaced IRC as the meeting place for a lot of groups, so I don't see the reason to encourage people to meet at two places instead of one. If the intention is to provide content via IRC, without a doubt that content will be inaccessible to many of our members who don't/can't/won't use IRC. If the intention is just public off-topic real-time chat, I'd rather see a chat plugin for the forum implemented since at least it will be accessible to all members.
This is not an official channel and is not recognized in any way. IRC is problematic as it needs active monitoring, defense, and really doesn't come active much. We're in such varying time zones, I think maybe one or two were on at any time. I would say a site hosted setup would be better, but we're moving to another server in a matter of a week or two, so it doesn't make sense to do it now.