Is there any way you could move the IRC channel to the irc.stardock.com server? It would be a lot easier to get people to idle there if they didn't have to join another server to do so.
Possibly, but there are some technical issues. I've talked to the pugbot owner (it's quite a program that does all sorts of neat things, such as report the weather and give out sports scores upon request) and he listed a number of conditions for putting his program up on another IRC server, so I don't think it would work out. Also, you can't register an account with the Stardock IRC server nor can you own channels, which means we could never have channel ops (and thus enforceable rules) if it ever took off. I think folks who take the game seriously enough that they'd want to play PUGs would be willing to learn how to join a separate IRC server.
we can either keep it as IRC like you're using, or we can integrate a chatroom to the site, it'd be your show. The idea is to work together mostly. Ladders and tournaments is my thing, PUGs is yours, but we can combine the communities together and benefit everyone.
Thank you for offering to support us, Third Prophecy. Having a PUG match community and a clan community can really go hand-in-hand since an active PUG match and IRC channel is one way for clanners to get to know the clanless and other clanners and vice-versa and it might also encourage clans to set up their own IRC channels, improving live communication between clans. Also, clans could encourage their members to come play PUG matches, which in my experience is an excellent way to get clan match-like experience without actually playing a clan match that counts for something.
I think our best bet is to keep it on the IRC since that's what's worked very well in the past (for Unreal Tournament) and we already have a channel set up to go and the ABot is alread there. I could join your forum and then put up a post and you could sticky it. One thing you could do would be to set up a link or a Java chat applet that could take people to the pug channel.
This link will take people directly to the #sinspug channel via a Java applet:http://www.gameradius.org/javachat/index.php?nick=YourName&channel=sinspugAll folks need to do is enter a name and then click
and they'll be there. I suspect that once people get into it, they'll want to get a stand-alone IRC browser such as Firefox's Chatzilla plugin or mIRC.
You can also easily add a GameRadius Java Chat room to your website:
http://www.gameradius.org/index.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=28