I had an Idea today if we had a php script that could pull the number of users in the IRC channel would you be willing to use it to display the number of users online in the IRC in the chat button?
I had it working like this in my mind. when the number of users online is requested it checks either a file or the sql database and looks at a time stamp, if that time stamp is older than say 5 minutes it connects to the IRC server and finds the number of users in the channel and saves the information along with the current time in that file or data base.
if the time stamp is within the refresh time it simply returns that number instead of connecting to the server this would keep the bandwidth down and still let us see if there were people in IRC without connecting. it might get more people to come into IRC if they knew there was already people there.