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.
This would make sense if the same things happened on IRC.
They don't.
In my experience, 99.5% of the bad stuff on IRC happens in the main #battlemaster channel. The continent channels are almost completely unused of late.
The realm channels, by a vast majority, consist of positive, sensible discussion about the realm among players who belong to the realm, and idle, but positive and sensible, OOC chat among those same players.
The former, at its very worst, can exclude those who do not come to IRC from such discussion. Removing the links to the realm channels will do less than nothing to prevent that: indeed, it will exacerbate it, as those who have been going there for years on desktop clients will still go there. All it will do is exclude new players from being easily able to access them.
The latter is the very best of what IRC has to offer. It helps us to get to know our fellow players as people, and bond with them, thus increasing the sense of community.
In sum, aside from a misplaced feeling that we have to be "fair" to all our different out-of-game communications channels, I can see absolutely no good reason to remove the auto-joins to the channels for the realms people belong to.
