What's your idea?
Create an IRC client to be used on Drupal.org, giving users the ability to participate on IRC directly on Drupal.org.
What are the benefits?
Opens up IRC to users who may not know how to access IRC, or even know that it exists. We could maybe set up a way of syncing Drupal.org usernames with IRC.
What are the risks?
Overrun of users on IRC channels.
How can we measure the impact of this idea? (metrics)
Analytics on the embedded chat page.
Who directly benefits from / will use this improvement? (target audiences)
Anyone who wants to use IRC.
Are additional resources available for discovery/implementation? (volunteer effort, financial backing, etc.)
Freenode offers a great IRC web client for free that can be embedded right on a drupal.org support page. We could pretty easily make a webchat block that would even get the username of the currently logged in user and pre-populate the sign-in page.
http://webchat.freenode.net?nick=drupalerinneed&channels=%23drupal-suppo...
Comments
Other than auto logging into
Other than auto logging into support channels what is the major advantage to this over just recommending http://webchat.freenode.net with a quick video describing some of the IRC basics?
I think a small video tutorial describing getting support on IRC would be much more beneficial than creating another tool on d.o that we would need to maintain.
Great idea and...
.... and very easy to implement. Add a link to somewhere to
http://webchat.freenode.net?nick=$username&channels=%23drupal&prompt=1and be done. Alternatively, you can even iframe it on drupal-webchat.org or somesuch. Absolutely minimal custom code.i like this idea
many many many sites have a "support chat" feature. if we had a call to action that opened up an IRC box to #drupal-support i think that would be pretty slick
I think therefore I Drupal
Something better than IRC?
With all that's new in web technology, couldn't we do something better than IRC?
Also, I wonder if integrating a chat feature into drupal.org would stretch our resources too thin. We have so many issues that need help resolving already, that to add maintenance of a chat feature might overload the available workforce.
However, it would be nice to have something more real time than the forums, but I'm not sure IRC is it.