I've got a bit of a concern to raise regarding reliance on IRC for spreading information important to the community. As I was preparing this week's HWN, I made the comment on #haskell that it's been a quiet week. Several people that were at ICFP and the workshops disagreed, saying there had been a lot of activity. But none of it appeared on the Haskell lists. With the help of some IRCers, I found information in Autrijus' blog and a link to some IRC logs. There *was* a lot going on. I would like to make a friendly request that important things like this be posted to the mailing lists. I don't have a problem with them being on IRC as well, but there are several problems with it being "IRC only" or "IRC mostly" or even "conference only": * The only way to participate effectively is to be in the IRC room at the exact same time as the other participants. Very difficult to include everyone in a global community such as that. * It is very cumbersome, and sometimes even impossible, to extract conversations from IRC logs, given that several conversations could have been happening at once in the channel. Mailing list archives, with support for threads, are much easier to read. As an aside, I will not be writing up summaries of IRC logs for HWN, though if someone else cares to do so and send them to me, I'd put them in. I simply don't have the time or the desire for a pounding headache that most people get from reading IRC logs ;-) -- John