Have not read th whole thread, but:
Closing the locals is a good move (I say as someone who posts in the locals quite a lot).
But we SHOULD ALSO remove links to IRC realm/continent-threads, or at least stop automatically shunting players into them. If our thought is that these kinds of politically-based ghettoizations are bad, then we shouldn't just slam the forum. If people want to hunt down Dwilight channels on IRC, fine, but don't have them default into them when they click the IRC button.
