Originally Posted by
isomage
Well, we've had several visitors so far, but unfortunately I haven't been around much the last couple of days.
To address some of the points that have been raised:
The IRC service I've used here is free, and we can indeed have moderators capable of enforcing order (and while I currently have ownership of the channel because I registered it, that ownership, along with moderator-creating ability, can be transferred to Cartographers' Guild admins on request).
I personally prefer IRC to the various forum-based chats I've seen, as it tends to be more robust and doesn't tie visitors down to a single interface; people are free to use their preferred chat clients.
We can embed the mibbit widget in the site so that there'd be a link at the top and when you clicked it you'd get a separate Cartographers' Guild page complete with menus and branding, with the chat area in the middle. We could also provide information to help people get connected with various other popular clients.
On the other hand, a built-in vBulletin chat would presumably enforce forum membership as a requirement to join, which might be desirable.
Random spammers shouldn't be much of a problem, as they can be with public IRC channels; this channel is not advertised on the IRC network's channel list, so you'd have to know about it already via the forum (or make a lucky guess) in order to find it.
There's another advantage to IRC in this particular case: the channel I've set up is on the same network as the Campaign Builders' Guild's channel, and there is probably a fair amount of overlapping interest (I've seen their members here on our forum). If we stayed there, then once you were in our channel you could join their channel in a different tab and switch back and forth.
As for being on or off topic, it's my personal view that some off-topic is a good thing (and would be one of the reasons for having a chat in the first place). On other forums for which I've set up chats, the conversation tends to split somewhere around 50/50 between on-topic and off-topic conversation. It becomes a more social place where you can find out more about each other and your shared interests, and build friendships rather than passing acquaintances. I know that roleplaying games are a significant common interest here and it would be a shame if they couldn't be discussed. IRC allows all users to create temporary channels simply by attempting to join them (if you join a channel that doesn't exist, it gets created, and will vanish after everyone leaves), so people could be encouraged to take discussions out of channel if they were interfering with the main chat.
If disruptions happen, they can be dealt with in the same way they are on the forums: warnings can be given, chat moderators can remove users from chat temporarily or permanently, and repercussions for continued disruption could even be extended to the forums (civility would obviously be expected anywhere under the Guild's umbrella -- you don't get to act like a jerk in chat and not have it count). The moderator's life is occasionally challenging, but the benefits seem to make it worth it.
I think the biggest obstacle might be the small ratio of users to time zones. Visitors so far have been scattered around the US and Canada, and even Finland, and there hasn't been much overlap. If we did manage to get a core group of lurkers from various places, however, then people would be more likely to find someone active when they stopped by. But it may just turn out that there aren't enough people for the thing to work.
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... and even though I'm in CET+1 and most of the guild is in US time zones I'm guessing I might catch someone now and then, especially since it works in a pop-up and thus can just "hang there". One of the things I like about chat rooms is that you don't have to stay on topic and don't have to be afraid of thread-jacking, since the stuff is not on the site permanent. Whereas when you have a "fun comment" in the threads inhere you sometimes don't write it cause you don't want to stear the thread away from its topic. 
