Ok after a suggestion from Strider on IRC I have deivsed the latest and greatest development in Instant message and chat room (IRC included) message systems. We use the royal mail!
This all was developed from the following comment:
Strider I just woke up. I'll get back to you in six hours.
I figured that if it takes that long for him to reply normally you might as well go one step better and send it by post. It would allow so many more options.
For example, recorded delivery would give you the same result as if you typed !ping , also if you wanted to do a private chat you send it by next day delivery for a quicker response. And of course you could include games in this as well, such as tic-tac-toe and hangman. All that would have to happen is between each message someone makes their next move/guess/decision.
Its so brilliant it might just work. Only problems flagged up so far are that of smilies. Using large cardboard smilies as orginally planned would increase postage costs. And using photo graphs would also increase the expense.
As we work out these problems we will tell you, over and out team!