Please do not mention #GBAtemp.TA, as it currently stands, its not on good terms with the GBAtemp staff. It was originally created by Spikey for that purpose, a channel for non-serious chatter similar to the Testing Area here on the forums, but he ended up opping the wrong people who basically took the channel over and banned him from it.
Now the problem is, in the past, it was a bit out of control, the current ops of the channel basically let everything goes, which also included illegal subject matter. While I won't go into details, this has angered a lot of people and basically made the TA IRC channel off limits and made it a bannable offense to even mention it on the #gbatemp.net channel. While things on the TA have been pretty clean lately, it has a little ways to go before becoming a respectable channel again.
At any rate, to get back on topic. Currently EFNET has no vhost or channel services like Chanserv or Nicjserv which poses problems of people taking over the channel, changing their identify to pretend to be another person, and so on. Ops and such are also fairly limited in what they can do. Currently the only options Ops have is to ban someone even for minor offenses. Also this requires us to use several bots on the channel just to keep the channel from being taken over and provide services like auto-ops which normal channel services easily provide that EFNet lacks.
Also if we do move to another server, preferably one at GBAtemp we wouldhave more control over it. We could even tie the Nickserv into the GBAtemp site so you can login into Nickserv using your forum account and password as well as tie your IRC account into the forums. We could also list those currently chatting on the IRC channel on the GBAtemp site as well and have an IRC Java applet as well connected to the channel that people can use from their web browser.
