There’s finally a working chat Plugin for the Discourse software this forum is running on: It’s the Babble chat plugin. You can use it with the megaphone icon in the top right. It’s hopefully self-explanatory. It’s a semi-persistent chat application that stores the last 200 messages (by default, I can change that limit).
Currently, there is only one chat room, the General Shoutbox. The plugin has the possibility to support multiple chat rooms, and to limit them to specific user groups. At the moment I don’t see a need for that feature, but if you want to use it, please contact me.
For now, I have disabled the other chat tools on this site.