I confess I've been a bit put-off by IRC over the past few years. I'd used it for years in the '90s as a clunky-but-effective way to chat with a number of people at once. But the definitive experience for me was in 2001, when I was in an IRC chat on women's issues (we'll leave it at that) and a troll came after me. He (and I assume it was a he, but I cannot be sure) was able to not only grab my IP address, but also my ISP logon ID. I thought he was a hacker, savvy in the arcane ways of IRC (and there are plenty of those). But sure enough, I was able to do the same thing on everyone else there. That was a shocker.

The troll pestered me via email for a few days, and the default account started getting flooded with spam. I was safe, but still felt quite violated. Since then, aside from a brief attempt to join a "trusted" chatroom using a client for my newly acquired Mac, which resulted in crashy failure, I've not ventured into IRC.

So when Lisa Stone asked me if we could host some sort of online chat for BlogHer, I did not make the impulsive leap to IRC.

We've taken some heat for that decision:

Fact is:
IRC can be accessed by many clients without a problem and has proven to be an overall workable system.

Flashinterfaces on the other hand are usually a usability nightmare for experienced users.

With IRC clients, I do have an out of the box log in my defined format. I will not have anything similar in that flash chat.

In a response there, I wrote

Yes, it would be great if everyone had good, stable IRC clients installed, knew how to use them, and knew how to protect themselves and their personally identifiable information. But we felt it was fair to assume that most people interested interested in Blogher are not computer geekettes and have no IRC experience.

Maybe we're wrong, but our guess was (and is) that most of the women and men wanting to connect about Blogher specifically would not be interested in researching, finding, installing, configuring and learning how to use new software just to participate in an online chat.... For most participants, we guessed that their "chat" experiences were more of the YahooIM variety. In this regard, we hope that this Flash chat solution works out.

And that pretty much says it all.

I'm the first to admit that non-IRC chat is something of a challenge. Even corporate-owned systems like MSN or Yahoo, or distributed relay systems like Skype, can face challenges in maintaining a chat with more than a handful of users.

We're trying to offer a simple interface that does not require any software installation, and does not subject the user to constant screen refreshes. I confess that this is something of an experiment. We'll see how it goes. (I'll post more specifics about the service once the chatroom is officially up, later today.)

It's not ideal. But then, no matter what we do, someone would be disappointed. My experience as site admin on a dozen or so sites is that most online users these days are not geeks. (The simple fact that Internet Explorer is still the most-used browser out there, despite the superior Firefox's being available for free, speaks volumes as to how reluctant people are to go installing new software on their computers.)

And so we'll muddle through this year, and learn from the experience. Next year we'll have time to do something more elegant.

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