Is there a jME IRC channel somewhere? I saw a blog post from 2009 that mentioned one, but there weren’t any details. Where do you guys idle?
I dont think anybody of the team “idles” there. Most of the developers including me would not dare to go on a public channel answering the same old questions day in day out 
The team uses a private chat, invitation goes along with contributions.
would help if the jme team just idled there, even if they don’t answer anything, it really helps build the irc community. Many open source contributors come from these sort of places and will help jME in the long term.
Its all about the time investment unfortunately… I know that if I spend time on instant messenger/IRC/whatever I find an excuse to distract myself from whatever I should be doing 
The nice thing about the forums is that you get an email when a topic you’re in gets a hit (or when a sub-forum you’re subscribed to gets a new post)
our #jme channel on freenode now has a friendly ‘jmebot’ which keeps the idlers informed about new forum topics.
[18:34] Core-Dump: hi jmebot
[18:34] jmebot: hi Core-Dump
[18:49] jmebot: forum:pspeed posted on the forum topic (Resolved) Gamebreaking Memory Issues in the group Troubleshooting ??? General - http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/groups/general-2/forum/topic/gamebreaking-memory-issues/#post-119929
The bot is still young and has to learn a few things.
Its an EggDrop Bot, so if anyone wants to teach him new tricks, just drop me a msg.
Oh, cool. Are you into this stuff? Making it able to connect via jabber/gchat would maybe allow me to look into the IRC channel more often, theres no proper IRC clients for iOS that I’d really use
i’m just playing around with it 
It seems also not very useful to post every forum update the the channel (there are just too many), right now i limit it to new topics.