This has been suggested a few times already and here's my "RHP history lesson" reply to one of them.
"We had a chat room in the very early days. Sort of......
It was not on the RHP site, but was instead a private chat room for RHP members only and was maintained on a separate IRC site. The RHP site put up a link to connect to the chat room but did not have anything else to do with running it. Live chat was a train-wreck for us. It lasted for just a few weeks before some of the RHP members of that time got it closed because they could not behave themselves and comply with the rules of conduct imposed by that particular IRC site.
If I remember correctly it was just a few of our malcontents and drama queens that could not get along, so they tried to take out their animosity on each other in real-time on that chat site, and then they tried to drag it back into our forum. I guess you could call it our own little "Red Hot Soap Opera".
I'm pretty sure Russ remembers it well, and I'm also willing to bet that you will not see live chat on the RHP site any time soon! But then, I could be wrong."
<edit> Here's a little more detail of how it was back then:
RHP chat room - (about) 21 January 2002 until 25 March 2002
An RHP member named Vampire_Man was running an irc chat room elsewhere on the internet and offered to set up a private chat room for RHP members only. He and maybe one or two other people were the moderators of that room and all that was required was that those who used the room would have to comply with standards of acceptable behavior as defined by the owners of the chat room server.
Because of the unacceptable behavior and antics of some of the chat room participants the room was shut down after approximately two months, give or take a few days.
The RHP site did not have anything to do with the operation of the chat room other than to furnish a direct link to the room from the RHP site, and all that was required to use the room was that you had to be a member of RHP.
