If people want to chat, they can, with or without RAFO, wotmania, whatever. If they aren't, that really has nothing to do with RAFO. Proof? wotmania's been down a little over a year; how long has it been since the kind of chat everyone keeps talking about existed? Three years? Five? I suspect it depends on whom you ask; some people think wotmania went to hell after the Great Crash, but some people always think everything was better when it was their own little secret. Providing an onsite RAFO chat room isn't going to turn back the clock any more than preserving one at wotmania did.

All the dynamics that killed wotmania chat, many of the ones that killed wotmania, are still in place, and I think that has more to do with people not using the various chat alternatives. If that's fixed RAFO won't need a chat because it can use Skype, or Vent, or Google talk, or even AIM or FB. We could use an IRC chat like the one Jonielle and Floffe started (remember that? I prefer the Skype interface and ability to call, but there was nothing WRONG with IRC--except that it got even less use than Skype. ) Until that's fixed putting a chat on RAFO is just creating one more place for nothing to happen 90% of the time, punctuated by boredom driven escapades that remind us why RAFO doesn't have a chat.

The problem, not just for chat but for websites, is finding a way to host it, then drawing enough constructive regulars that you don't spend all your time either staring at a blank screen or cleaning up behind someones misbehavior. For a variety of reasons, both wotmania and its chat ceased to do that some years ago, and whether a chat service continued exist was neither here nor there to that. Until that issue's resolved you can create all the chats you want on any site you want and it won't change anything, because all the problems that killed wotmania chat remain. I'm not sure there are any easy answers there, but if people just want to go back to wotmania chat ca. 2005, they don't need a chat, they need a time machine.