There have been a few times when I answered someone's question on usenet or irc, and it turned into a more in-depth discussion where they hired me for small con

There have been a few times when I answered someone's question on usenet or irc, and it turned into a more in-depth discussion where they hired me for small consulting engagements. I don't think there needs to be any middleman web site for informal things like that to pop up. I had thought Stack Overflow itself let people note in their profiles that they were available for hiring or consulting. I believe Github also does that. Regarding your specific Lua question, maybe you could just offer a bounty. I also have to wonder why you want Lua in the browser since you already have Javascript.