Being a former Admin to a Sci-fi RP community. I can exactly confirm to you how detrimental things like this are. You have your game but people take their discussions outside of it. Something that should never happen no matter what. Because these discussions took place outside of the games environment they end up poisoning the games flow.
That said when i also ran the communities IRC. I made it explicitly clear that if i caught 1 hint of IRC discussions influencing RP's and IC decisions. I would shut it down immediately. Something i actually ended up doing.... After the loss of the IRC (in the community the IRC was the equiv of forummasters and the forums battlemasters) Suddenly you see things become correct and proper again. People started enjoying the notions of PM'ing for the sake of PM's. They started using forum tags to identify if its RP message and such. It simply worked better when the evil was rooted out.
So i for one actually like knowing the locals and RP boards are going to be closed. If people want to preserve their long going stories. They should either write a Wiki page or simply save the discussions to a txt file and carry on in their gameplay.
