I am in Gerhard's camp and also believe IRC-based support is a rubbish idea. The 'solution' of making the chat logs public won't solve a thing, because no-one who is too lazy to read a topic will go through the trouble of actually digging through a chat log (which is a couple orders of magnitude more work). - #drupal is the place where most new people would enter. Do we want the first sight of Drupal chat to be a bustling hub of development activity, or do we want it to be cesspit of repetitive support questions whose life-span is measured in minutes? - #drupal has always been about developers meeting and talking. By making #drupal a support channel, we are saying that providing support for our users is more important than developing the software. That statement offends me: I develop for personal benefit; to extend my knowledge, hone my skills and for the satisfaction of creating something valuable. - if people are vaguely interested in Drupal, they will idle in #drupal, not #drupal-devel. Thus, it is a barrier to entry and shields development from public eyes. What do we have more trouble with: attracting new users, or attracting new developers? Hint: it's not the first. - If users are frustrated because they see a bunch of people chatting yet unwilling to answer their questions, perhaps they shouldn't assume that information is free and that somehow, knowledgable people have a duty to inform the ignorant. Steven