IRC is a good idea and I'm definitely open to suggestions as usual.
The only challenge would be to find a nice IRC web-based client that we could put in the "Chat" section of the site and which could connect to our IRC channel. I know that computer savvy users will be using an IRC client instead, like mIRC, but we want to make the chatting process as accessible as possible to everyone, hence the Chat section at the top. Fortunately, most popular IRC servers nowadays provide an IRC web-based interface. So, we'll see what can be done there.
And yes, I'm a HE...