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I hate OOC channels of any sort, but I also recognize a need for people to break character sometimes. Often it's to ask for syntax help, or to deal with someone who's new and has done (or is about to do) something REALLY out of genre or inappropriate. Sometimes it's just a need to get out of the heavy intense roleplay and goof around and relax with friends in an OOC manner.
Sometimes these things need immediate reaction rather than a post on the boards and waiting for a response, which may or may not ever come.
For this reason, I like how Inferno sets it up. No, I don't play there anymore, but I still love some of the systems they have and feel comfortable extolling those systems' virtues <g> So here's how they have it set up. Opinions welcome of course.
When you log in, you don't log in as your character. You log in as your UID (User Identification). So my UID was Ephemera, and the character on the Ephemera account was Nirani.
Now Ephemera is logged in, and exists *only* in a 10-room area called Ice9 Reality. In Reality there exists the OOC message boards, a post office for in-house mail, a conference room for OOC forums when admin needs/wants to discuss things with the player base (like major changes to the accounting system, or rollout of a new quest via an event that might take many hours to complete and they need to warn the players to arrange their personal schedules appropriately if they want to do so), and a few rooms where people can talk privately one-on-one in an OOC way (like a GM helping a newbie understand things, for example).
There's also the chargen entry and game entry in the "upstairs" area, and the character goes through one or the other and ends up in the game, either wherever they left it, or at the local "dropoff point" for new characters.
It's a physical separation of OOC, and it allows the RP to stay RP, while still giving people the opportunity to go OOC without disrupting the game in any way, shape, or form.
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