I think IRC would be a brilliant idea, all you need is to get it a bit more known that you have an IRC channel, i would join that channel alot if you had one.
There is a spamming issue on IRC but you can set peramiters to ban people if they start to spam. And then later IP ban people so they can't come back...
in the words of Jebus:
"make it come alive with the flavour of five"