Perhaps if you with to enjoy the steaming glory of all the irc has to offer, you might actually consider stopping by. It is not my experience that it is filled with homophobic remarks, hatred or other random bigotries, though occasionally it comes up.
A couple of points bear mentioning, however: irc is more akin to actual speech than a forum and folks have very little time to 'edit their posts' particularly given that ours is a keyboard channel and many of us can type.
Secondly context is critical so trying to infer someone's mood, intent and to what degree their tongue was in their cheek... it's hard enough when you are there, and it's more or less a non-starter when you receive a quote from a friend.
Finally - there is both an understanding and a rule to the effect that posting logs from irc publicly is not to be done without the agreement of the channel owners and a suitable warning supplied to users on log-in. That is to say: irc is fundamentally not publishing - it is chat.
Please visit for a while and decide for yourself to what degree folks are hateful jerks.
Also - we don't have a filter preventing us from cursing - curse freely. If you curse too much, folks will ask you to chill.
The irc is more than just 'open' to anyone from the forum - I want to be clear: everyone is welcome.
While not everyone does a great job of making that clear, we still try to encourage folks to avoid actions which would actually make folks feel unwelcome, including but not limited to negative language derived from bigoted stereotypes.
So - to repeat the salient points: 1) try not to be an jerk on irc. 2) please do not quote folks out of context in general 3) please do not post logs from irc in public as folks have not been warned in advance that such will be done. The expectation, if not the technical reality is that irc is 'off the record'.
thanks for your time,
dfj
