Just wanted to let everyone know I haven’t given up on chat. Discourse is currently working on a chat feature native to the forum software. I’m an early tester of that as they are developing it.
It will bring back what we need here which is a chat that is integrated with the forum itself. Instead of me working to bridge the two, it will be native. It is also being built with the failings of our old solution in mind.
One of the better features it has is the ability to push chats into a topic in order to save some of the history and context that often gets lost with chats.
I have no timeline on when it will migrate to beta status which will allow me to deploy it here.