Don't be surprised. :) IRC is a de-facto standard for real-time chatting. Many people are aslso used to this facility implemented in other protocols (ICQ for instance). I am also in favor of using IRC for CB. It simplifies things greatly, gives more power to the thing, and most importantly it removes the client-software limitations. Reloading a page is so boring. :) There are also a number of irc2web gateways which provide a better interface then CB does now (server-push/nph, or java and all that).

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET