Hello, and welcome to Sysnative!
Thank you very much for making these suggestions! We're always looking for new ideas, and we're always grateful for ways we can improve what we do.
On the point of the video tutorials, why do you think that it's better to have video tutorials rather than written texts? Youtube currently does not have many highly technical resources because for the most part, they're better off in text. To watch an hour long lecture online takes an hour. To skim through the transcript takes a native speaker under 10 minutes (often quicker, although can be much longer if the material is difficult to understand). Additionally, video resources always have the problem that they're difficult to pause and rewind (it's much harder to keep flicking back in video than to re-read the last sentence), they're difficult to reference (where to jump to in order to find the bit you're looking for, you can't work at your own pace, but the pace set by the lecturer, etc. etc.
Personally, I view them as an inferior method of content delivery. I've actually considered them very seriously in the past though - I deliver an online training course in a highly technical discipline. I did carefully consider whether to use a text medium, video myself giving a university style lecture, or a video of myself working through example problems, going over parts of the technology and simply explaining it, etc. etc., but I came to the conclusion that textual resources are the best. I think that they're also quicker and easier to produce.
Personally, I think the same applies to debugging, and we're better off with only textual resources. Youtube currently doesn't have many because it appears that all the other content writers came to the same conclusions, so people won't look there for such content either. Youtube's much closer to a social network than anything else - it's for social content not technical content.
As for the IRC server, I don't think we're yet a big enough forum to need it. We're also a highly technical community, not a social network, and for our current purposes, the visitor message and private message system works quite well enough in my opinion.
I hope this helps.
Richard
