At the risk of contributing nothing useful, I'd just like to heartily agree with the parent post. IRC is a far superiour interface for this sort of thing. The only problem I see with actually echoing an irc channel in to the chatter box is that, due to it's far superiour interface, conversations are far faster on irc, so if you only refreshed once every minute you might miss 50% of the conversation! Of course this should be read as more of a desire for everyone to just join irc in the first place and not have any of these problems.