I'm open to suggestions. But I'm fairly sure that farming some ephemeral internet points in the unstructured real-time "forum" with a thousand participants in a single linear "topic" moderated with unwritten rules for months or years, all just to maybe get an invite to a yet another slightly better IT forum is the lowest possible priority on the internet for me. I have more quality content to read and watch than there is time. I would check it out if there was some sane registration process, maybe even a convoluted ones, with karma barriers, waitout times and limitations on the sub-forum access for newbies. But IRC? No, thanks. Discord scourge is annoying enough, and that is just worse Discord in every possible aspect.

Basically the hurdle is disproportionately absurd to the reward in this particular case.