Wow, this took a drastic turn, LOL. Maybe got a little blown out of proportion along the way. Just for the record, I wasn't trying to "get members behind [me]," I was just looking to see if anyone else shared my preference. This wasn't intended to be some TerraForums Chat Revolution, LOL.
That said, yes, some of us are addicted to the hobby. Myself, I was up at 4am last night (Friday night) as a young male in a college, partying town. I was in my plant room repotting some plants. Sad? Perhaps, but I had fun doing it! For me, personally, carnivores are my number 1 hobby. It's what I do the most with my free time. If I like to check up on the forums and/or chat between classes or when otherwise wasting time, so be it! That was the main reason I proposed the IRC thing. Not really to make any difference in the site (because, aesthetically speaking, it wouldn't), just for the option of having an IRC client on my phone to chat it up. And the reason I like the idea of IRC over the JAVA one is because of just that. You could have a dedicated app on your phone -just- for IRC, no finagling around with your browser, figuring out how to to make it work with various workarounds (the refreshing the archives thing). But it's obviously not that big a deal.
I do know, however, that there are various software that can be installed on the boards and then a client on a cell phone to give you a much better mobile forum experience, but that is, again, totally up to Andy. And I have no experience with those, so I have no idea how well they work, though they do typically get pretty good reviews. These little addon/app combos, as far as I know, do not address any JAVA chat sort of thing, just the discussion boards themselves. I'm not advocating the use of such software, just stating that it is a possibility. I don't know, though, my phone's browser tends to handle the forums pretty well on its own, though I know different phones and different mobile OSs have varying degrees of success with forums. The chat I can say doesn't work at all, even connected to a WiFi network. That's just the standard browser, though, haven't bothered to try any other ones. They may or may not work better. In fact, I'm going to test some out and I'll get back with my results, in case anyone is interested.
Andy, question for you: What is the name of the chat application? Just so I can look into what people do and do not have success with as a mobile option for it.