It's come to my attention that our website IRC client, which provides a convenient means for users to ask a quick question, is causing a lot of frustration amongst our volunteers on the channel who are trying to provide support and manage the channel.

There's three issues that I'm aware of:

* Drive by's:

Very often people will log in, shoot off a question that is easily answered, then depart before anyone has a chance to answer it.

* Language:

Often people will express questions in their native language. As our current support volunteers only include English speakers, this just isn't going to work out.

* Anonyminity:

The nice thing about the IRC client is since it doesn't require login credentials, it's quick and easy to use. The downside is we have no idea who the person is. This means no way to contact them out of band (e.g. shoot them an email with the answer to their question, or post it to their inkscape.org account), and no way to ban people who behave abusively (the channel op can kill the session, but the troll could just re-login.)

There may well be other issues, but I think this is representative.

Compounding the problem, I think the IRC support crew feel a bit disempowered: The web irc client is part of the website and thus maintained by the website maintainers.

The easiest solution would be to switch off the irc client on the website, or for the IRC support staff to set /ignore (or worse) on "inkscaper*". But these don't really *solve* the problems, they just brush them under the rug.

Are there other changes (maybe minor tweaks, maybe major re-thinks) that would address these problems while still helping users get answers to their questions, quickly and/or interactively?

Bryce