Hi, Newguy paulbee here. Hope this is not repeating a previously discussed issue.

I have a fundamental question. WHY OH WHY do we even need IRC at all. I say this because of my frustration with all the cryptic geekglish command-line stuff I had to familiarize myself with just to even get on the board in IRC (eg /msg blah blah blah).

After all that work, I then found that to be able to download stuff I had to get onto #lurk. So again I labored to register with #lurk, I even got a confirmation email from them.

Alas to my chagrin, the darn thing told me that my nick was unrecognized and that only registered people may enter. I tried it again a couple of days later with the same result, and now I've decided it just ain't worth the trouble.

So I ask the question, why the need to do IRC in the first place? why not simply add live chat or anything else to http ?

Is IRC some kind of macho Geek deal to sort the "men from the boys" (geek wise) trip or what? OR is it just a cheaper operation than http?

I'm stumped.