Introducing OmnomIRC - The integration of IRC in our forums

After multiple requests from various Omnimga members in the past 2 years, we finally decided to add a chatroom on our forums that is directly linked to #omnimaga IRC channel on EFnet. Connecting our IRC chatroom with the forums or vice-versa was made possible with the help of Netham45 after discussing ideas for the past year, who has installed a new chat system on our forums: OmnomIRC. Now when guests login on the forums, they see a chat box at the top of every page, where the last 15 lines of IRC logs are shown. If they have at least 50 posts on the forums, they can participate in the real-time IRC discussion directly from there, without the need to download an IRC client or to use an unreliable web-based one. For people under 50 posts, they can still see the chat in real-time, but they need to use an external client to access the IRC chatroom. Our guests need to access #omnimaga on EFnet to view the conversation at all. For those who want to see more of what has been discussed online, they can click the few logs links at the top of OmnomIRC.

Because we still try to encourage the usage of our forums, especially for help and support and major projects updates, while keeping #omnimaga IRC channel for hanging out together and discussing various topics ranging from calculators, anime, music, video games and computers, this is why we decided to limit the usage of OmnomIRC to users who have 50 posts, like we did with the Arcade, while members with fewer posts sees the chat in read-only mode (unless they access it from IRC). This is also why we have the new IRC bot that notifies IRC users of the last post made within 10 seconds intervals, to let them know faster of what discussion is going on on the forums.

Hopefully this should help making Omnimaga more interactive and allow both the channel and the website to be connected even more. People who don't want to use OmnomIRC can click the collapse button at its top-right, like how they can type /ignore SpyBot45*!*@* on IRC to hide the post notifications on IRC.

Tonight, our forums have hit 30000 posts, have averaged at close to 196 per day in the past 30 days and 234 in the past 7. Like what happened 2 weeks ago, yesterday alone managed to fill the entire "Last 300 Posts" list. The continuing high activity on Omnimaga has finally bumped our daily posting average since August 25th 2008 over 50.