I figure to get a chat room area is easy but to have it utilized requires more effort because you need discussion at peak login times - to capture the interest of the users. Unfortunately with an international forum like this one this would require constant discussion, because login times could be 12h apart or have a double peak - peak in Europe then peak again in North America but ~5h apart.

We have a chat room on my "local" forum (note this forum is usually at the top of google searches (not sponsored) for the terms "golf" and "forum"), but there is never anyone on it so it remains empty. I figure this is because the number of "actual" contributors to the site is very small, so there is not enough overlap in login time even though we are all in the same time zone and for most of the members the same city.

An internet forum has a "1% rule"
Where for a 100 people online: 1 will create content, 10 will interact with it (comment or offer improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
[Edited because I found the article.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...823959,00.html]


Gandalf will weigh the pros and cons to decide whether it is feasible, but keep in mind:

How many people have kept their "blog" up to date?