I used to chat a lot, and have moderated on various chat forums too.
I grew wary of them though as more and more people appeared to become bullies fixated around a single personality versus other individuals. Newsflash - when I agreed to moderate the chat room I did not pledge allegiance to supporting the nastier side of some people. Example: People recording someone talking, then manipulating the recording and sitting on mic playing back the manipulated version to make it appear X said something about Y.
This Forum being text based, of course can be altered too, but the original threads are cached, so in my mind if it were ever needed one could prove one did not type X about Y.
I can see the positive side too though Data, in that, sometimes it would be quicker and perhaps easier to talk something through their computer problem, but given my general approach to problems, I'd be on all night trying to spell out all the commands to type verbally, and that soon would become somewhat tedious.
