I decided to take a look at the onlink's IRC channel in-game and not surprisingly I didn't see anybody in there.
However, this time I decided to open it with a IRC client to see if it was really working, now to my surprise, there were 2 people present in the channel but they only were not visible in-game, and the reason is that they were not using the in-game IRC tool, they were just using an IRC client.
Note that maybe nobody is visible at all in the embedded IRC tool, I just never found somebody who was actually playing the game with the tool open at the same time with me.
So my request is, can you tweak the tool a bit so it can recognize people using IRC clients?
That way would be a much easier way of trying to maintaining the channel active, as its easier to idle in the channel with a client, and whoever opened the in-game tool, would be able to see those people and try to talk to them, instead of just leaving at the moment they see that apparently there is nobody in the channel.
An active in-game channel is important for a game, as it can create a community, retaining its players. That feature was almost completely ignored by uplink, yet its the feature that holds many games alive nowadays, people want to have a good chat once in a while, besides playing the game. It's also a good way to discuss about the game and ask questions.
I don't think its a good idea to waste a feature that is already implemented in Onlink, with a functional server running. So why not promoting it in-game also? Like one of those messages that you receive telling you to try the HUDconnectionAnalyzer (I don't remember the exact name, so forgive me if I spelled it wrong).
It would also be great if it could retrieve some older chat logs when you login, to show that there was some activity before you logged in and the channel is not completely abandoned.
I'm not trying to bash the game, I love it, I'm just trying to look for ways to improve it and attract more people into it, cheers!