Hoople - 10:17 pm on Oct 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

Yup, the Y! bot thing is pretty bad. I stopped visiting in 2003 for that reason. Moderating a chat became a whole night of whack-a-mole and not very fun.

There are a lot of small/big/huge IRC networks with a Java/Ajax web front ends that do well. Making a room private with someone else hosting the IRC server is easy. There's one that integrate with Twitter too!

I met my wife in an IRC chat room in 1998.