I'm not opposed to this, but I hate chat rooms personally. That is to say, I don't see the harm in letting those who want to have a chat room have a chat room, but I would prefer to keep my conversations with the other members on the forum. I think chat rooms are
much too chaotic (since it's like having one massive "thread" instead of thousands of topic-specific threads) and because of that nature almost every single IRC chat room always de-evolves into a brainless "so how was your day?" "whatcha doin'?" "read any good books lately?" chat. Blah. >_< (For me, at least.)
If it were put to a vote, I'd be in favor of a chat room (which we already have) and I'd also be in favor of a chat box
so long as it was fully disable-able from within each member's Control Panel. If people want these things and aren't going to be hurting anybody with 'em, then why the hell not?
That's my mentality.