... not to mean any offense to Danu, but whoever was in charge of chat would have to be someone Ben trusted absolutely, because it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that there could someday be legal issues surrounding something happening related to chat, and also it would have to be someone able to exercise full authority without people feeling the need to go over his or her head to Ben if they didn't like the solution. And given how many people went over the chat admins' heads to Mike on wotmania ...

And maybe it's just me, but the idea of an unmoderated, enter-at-your-own-risk chat seems awfully skeevy for a site like RAFO. It sounds like the kind of chat room that would be used by perverts to hit on schoolkids. That sounds awful of me to say, and I don't mean to imply that we have a bunch of perverts around here, but really we should be decent enough human beings to not need a hands-off chat just to avoid the headache of over-moderation and constant arguments and appeals. However, we haven't proven that we are. We haven't proven at all that we can, as a community, behave like civilized human beings in a chat environment.

You might say, give us a chance to prove it then. If I were Ben, I would say, wotmania was that chance. Now we're dealing with my volunteer development time and my money. So too bad.

What it comes down to is that there are no indications that a chat wouldn't be abused by the very same people who abused it before, and no indications that the exact same issues wouldn't crop up once again. I understand that there are people who have never been involved in chat conflicts and want to have a feature like that for their own perfectly harmless enjoyment. But it does cost money, both in development time and in bandwidth, and you know without a doubt that there are certain members who would be right back in there doing the same things as before. Is that worth the effort and potential trouble? Will the few people who might come back for a chat feature be people who purchase premies to offset the cost?

Unless Ben were willing to either A) ban people from chat permanently based on IP address for any involvement in chat conflict and drama on either side of an argument, no mercy and no appeal; or B) completely ignore everything that happens in chat and keep any mention of it off the boards ... it seems to me that it wouldn't be worth the trouble.

Ultimately it's no skin off my teeth either way. I was a very, very infrequent chat user. But the conflict that spilled over to the boards was aggravating, and it seems that the constant bickering played a big role in Mike withdrawing from the community and ultimately shutting the site down. Could you really blame Ben if he didn't want anything to do with that?