Newbies are going to fail hard at IRC. Pretty much all of the questions Seb
poses for a built-in newbie chat still exist with a built-in Freenode
interface, with the addition of a complicated and often difficult (not to
mention culturally... unique) environment. Much better to think along the
lines of the Teahouse, but live. You can jump into a chat queue, and people
who want to help chat with you, and you can close the chat whenever you
want, and you can't contact people outside of the queue using chat.