Last we talked about it, we came to the conclusion of "not now". Right now the forums are new and surprisingly active, so your question would hopefully be answered quickly. Directing all the questions and talk to an IRC channel would leave these forums with no activity, and having some kind of permanent answers on a board would in my mind be much better. That, and right now we have no questions asked in our Questions and Answers board, so you don't have to worry about searching through old threads in case your question has been answered before.

In the future, perhaps we will have one.

Honestly, I'd probably favor some kind of chatroom on these forums over IRC. A place for the forum-goers to speak together and help each other rather than an IRC channel, which often will evolve into its own community sooner or later. And I can't say the IRC versions of any community I've ever seen have ever been too good compared to the forum or the website.

But you'd know what we think about that too if you read my response to the original poster and just replace IRC with shoutbox or chatroom or whatever.

Well, leaving random messages isn't something you could stop, anyways. But when you have a place for real time chatting, it's the best place to do real time Q&A, of course. So a chatroom of sorts would come with both and hopefully would have both and not just one of them.

Right now the argument against having something like that is that it would direct people away from the site, in a way. Of course it would only be completely off the site if it's an IRC channel and not a chatroom that's a part of this website, but it would direct conversation away from these boards. In my first reply, I did mention about the whole wanting to have some more permanent chat and answers on the forums first, before it is directed somewhere else. If we did it right away, we'd lose tons of good stuff that wouldn't be easily accessible to our users. And we really do want to have a lot that is easily accessible to our users.

For random messages right now, off topic's chat thread probably works well enough.