well about msn, i herd its like that, and whenever i wanted to contact anyone or someone needed to contact me, its going over msn...and even today i saw its still going like that for many teams. and i wrote this because having more then 5 windows of msn is frustrating, and thats just 5 of them...
when people see how easy and readable mirc is, how smooth it works, its just whole different story.
everybody use teamspeak3 today. 
There are still allot of players using mirc, actually every active player from ut99, from any other mod but camping is on irc.
They dont even have forums, nor anything else for so long! Just irc and everything they need to know they find out there! Simple as that.
Network is quakenet, you can find me in #tmnt channel
I am glad there is people like you who used and still use irc!
I didnt post anything about joining irc because i wanted to see how many are willing to give it a try!
If this number would be big enough people would give it a try. if you get my point.

Nowdays rumbles got boring, and it rarely happens to have a fun game.  what is still holding this mod are those fn, cwat ladders and so on which are getting boring as well.
I believe you played some pickup games using irc and you know that every time you join the pickup some different player could join. different teams are created every time.now imagine to get just around 70 players in one pickup channel, and ofc they join the channel when they have time and will to play. A rumble could happen really easy.
and we are talking about only 70 players... and yes there are at least double more active every day.
Getting informed about anything would be even more easy.
I really do believe things would go better if we move there, not just rumbles.. people would chat more, everything is actually live and so on.

This will be very hard to do. but i said i have to give it a try.
Having someone like you beside me would be more then awesome if people are willing to do this.