Just some thoughts . . .
Perhaps make it a weekly or biweekly event: SoR Saturday Night Robot Chat
You can also agree on some particular time, like 8pm Eastern or something like that. This way multiple people will be there at the same time, guaranteed. If you do this, I can link it up as a forum announcement at the top right.
Also potentially ideas:
Have the chatroom log itself daily/weekly.
Have those logs searchable.
Maybe set a rule that complicated questions should stay in the forum.
The chatroom should be more friendly, have jokes, unrelated stuff, etc.
As for the security issue . . . that may be a problem . . . for now, only trust who anyone says they are if you verify it with the IM feature in this forum first. Say something like 'please reply to my forum IM to verify yourself'.
But again, I'm crazy busy so won't be able to support this project much.
