Where did the IRC Channel sticky go?

[lch]

Gandalf Parker said:
Well its all subjective. If you go to the welcome thread you will see many people who came here from the strategy newsgroup, and many more still only use that as their source of answers.

Well, I wouldn't know, because "Introduce yourself" topics are not my thing. I'm not sure if I ever looked in there, but I certainly didn't introduce myself there. If you have something to say, then do it. But just saying Hi is talk for talking's sake, without meaning and thus of no interest to me.

Gandalf Parker said:
I dont know of any who came here from IRC.

Obviously, because they'd have to find the IRC channel first. Which they'd do here. That's why it needs advertising space.

Gandalf Parker said:
There is a Dom3 wiki which has as many supporters as the irc channel.

Again, what's that Dom3 wiki site address? I'm not sure if I know what you speak of. I know of a Wiki for Dom3 maps, one for a ladder of MP players and duel reports initiated by Folket, a Dominions section over at the StrategyWiki, and some very extensive chinese Wiki on Dom3 as well. Save for the last one, those Wikis are more or less dead and don't seem to find much use/updates. I don't want to underestimate the laudable effort and work that the people have put into these things, but let's face it, that's how it is - the StrategyWiki for example consists of more hollowed out skeleton pages than anything else. I really think that we could use a good Wiki on Dom3, by the way, I just don't think that we have anything in that regard yet. That's all besides the point - a Wiki is still for static information. The IRC channel is for direct communication.

Gandalf Parker said:
As for skype, there was a discussion to create a voice-channel which is as easy as creating an irc channel. There was disagreement on which program to use but I had thought that skype had won out. Maybe not. I dont really keep up on any of these.

I have tried Google for Skype channels, but while I'm usually pretty good at these things I don't think that I've found something which matches well enough, besides a proposal/plea which comes close on some forum, two years ago. The only thing that I know are conferences in Skype. Which require that somebody who wants to join it has to be explicitly invited by the creator of the conference, at the very least. There are more gripes that I have with Skype:

- you need to register with Skype if you want to use it
- if you do voice chat, everybody who wants to join needs a microphone
- if you do voice chat, the performance becomes horrible the more people join in, the usual prerogative is "everybody not talking kills the mike" and this will still make people on slow connections drop out uncontrollably
- it's a proprietary protocol, and I know of no software besides the official Skype builds that can utilize it, unlike e.g. Jabber
- it's P2P software which uses your client to stream voice chat of other users over your line while it's running, which is bad for people with quota-limited Internet, like me

Given that IRC is pretty widespread already, I don't think that there's an alternative that comes close, besides maybe Jabber - but I don't know enough about that yet and while I heard lots of good about it, I think that thing still hasn't taken off as much as it should.