it seems there was political purge,
maybe even an attempt at a coup d"etat
some disgruntled monitors and members (hard liners?) have started a copy cat site.
strange thing is ,they are using this site as a platform to promote it!
There was never a coup d'etat.
Some people who felt passionately about the board, and the way it was being ignored finally got a response from the "home office".
Unfortunately, the response was a kneejerk reaction - and virtually all moderators and admins were demoted/ejected/sacked without notice.
Your so-called "copy-cat site" was simply an enthusiast trying to figure out what all the fuss was about the claims of great pain and suffering in a migration, and how hard SMF was to set up. It took virtually no time to set up. The changes here, and the possibility of putting some useful content on the alternate site, saw it very roughly set up and it went live later that day.
i never could figure out what irc was all about.
i think it's a place you can go to whip or get whipped.
So rather than trying to figure it out, you (like so many others) lash out at, make entirely false assumptions about, and attack those things you don't understand.
I can see why they made you an admin. You have the same mindset.
For those who are capable of thinking for themselves, and have an interest in the appropriate use of technology, IRC predates *EVERY SINGLE WEB-BASED FORUM*.
IRC is basically a real-time chat system. It supports a large number of people who can discuss a wide variety of things with eachother, in real time, over very low capacity links (even 2400 bps modems work perfectly well with IRC).
One of the "problems" with IRC is that you can't go back and suppress comments that the administrators don't like. You can't expunge views you don't agree with, edit a persons views or posts.
DavidHK, I'll try to prepare you a quick summary of the last few months. It'll probably shed some light on things.