Hey thundara, good to see you and thanks for the post. We have discussed hosting our own IRC internally. It's not #1 on the list of things to get done though, so perhaps in the interim we should find a solution. I'm not on IRC as much these days and I personally don't know a lot about these things, insomniasexx, mk, forwardslash, any thoughts on how they ought to proceed? thundara, I trust your judgement on this. Hope all is well in Beantown.
I'm in agreement with flagamuffin that it's probably easier to use an existing irc server than to set up a new one. Then you only have to concern yourself with running the channel. And that's just a matter of having the ability to change the topic message and kick / ban users posting inappropriate content. A more involved question might be deciding a channel policy (no spam, no personal information, etc), but that's not too urgent considering how well behaved people have been on there (Minus lambda!).
lambda is one crazy mo-fo. Thundara, can you set this up? We can discuss any "policy" stuff after the fact.