Is this still the case? What is your default irc handler?
I had to add an account in pidgin to make things work.

This has the feel of being a distribution problem.  Is it still happening?

Let's see:

In January 2007 the report was filed.
In November 2008, Jean asked if it was still an issue and did not get a response.
WHy do we think that there is a better chance of a response in 2013?

Bug notification must have been buried or misplaced, not found when dusting off the old email box. A few years late better than never, i guess :)

Anyway, the originally reported behavior is not an ongoing issue. The original bug could have been a distribution problem as Morten says. I now get a response when live assistance is clicked, so that is resolved. However there is still room to improve here, so I will reopen the enhancement request. 

Since I am not an IRC user, i got the following notification dialog with a title of "irc://irc.gnome.org/gnumeric". The content is: "There is no program associated to perform the requested action. Please install a program or, if one is currently installed, create an association in the default Programs control panel." 

After clicking ok (the only option), I get a second dialog with no title and content of "Error launching application" after clicking 'OK' again in the second dialog, I am back in Gnumeric

firstly, It would be nice for notifications to allow a user cut/paste the content of the dialog for internet searching, bug reporting, copying the IRC address into an unregistered client, etc. The first dialog is not selectable.

The second dialog is selectable, but it is redundant and unnecessary.

As an aside, apparently registering programs to new protocols in Windows is not as simple as it should be. After installing ChatZilla for Firefox, i couldn't figure out how to register it to open the irc:// link that gnumeric provided. I subsequently installed Nettalk IRC client, which is a standalone program. It somehow set up it's own association to the protocol during it's install, making gnumeric's live assistance work properly. I do not care to spend more time poking around to figure out more details at the moment, as I don't use IRC.

Gnumeric apparently does not have anyone producing updated windows builds, I imagine this area of the program probably won't be looked at for a while. I have not tested this in a linux system, behavior in linux world may be similar, but IRC clients might be more common there. I am marking is as an OS=windows

Ideally, I would imagine that gnumeric would catch the error produced when the user does not have an IRC client properly installed and failover to either:

a)  An IRC access based on http: protocol (qwebirc might be a promising lead)  - doesn't everyone have a web browser these days? This unfortunately would require someone to have the overhead of hosting an IRC access website or 

b) maybe gnumeric could contain some minimal IRC client code that only connects to the #gnumeric channel or something. I imagine this kind of code could be troublesome to maintain by people who are interested in doing spreadsheet stuff though.

Pardon the long and overdue response - Thanks for maintaining and developing Gnumeric! Have a great day!

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This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnumeric/issues/70.