Chat is useful for immediate live communication with little to no logs, but there could be a lot of potential to violate BLUA much too easily on IRC chats. Someone would have to be in these channels 24/7 to monitor what goes on, and even then, if a chat picks up, it'll take a lot of time to read-through time-sensitive exchanges.
there's no more potential or ease to violate the BLUA in chat than anywhere else on the board. just like on the forums, the number of ops for a given channel would depend on how active it is, and bluelight staff is distributed all over the world so its unlikely that there would be nobody available to handle a situation if one arises, but even in the worst case scenerio, if its an official extension of the board then the admins and super moderators would likely be global ops, just like on the forums, so a quick message or report to one of them is all that would be needed to deal with things if there's no ops currently available at the time.
Setting up an IRC client on BL servers would be best if it required a chat account tied in to an account on the forum. And for there to be a logging system for site mods and admins to access.
i partly agree with this. there are services that can be used to lock a username to an individual so that nobody else can use it, but i dont know if it would be possible to crosscheck a user's IP on the board vs the one used in chat to
prevent impersonation (perhaps ensuring that a user's email matches their email on the board when registering a nickname? this is something that would have to be looked in to), but if its found out that somebody is impersonating another user, its pretty simple to fix. anonymous posting is allowed on the board though (well, kind of), so people should be allowed to go into the chat anonymously if they want, and it can be set up so that non-registered users can spectate but not talk, same as it is on the forums. channel logging is easy to set up, using a bot if nothing else, but just like on the board private messages should be left private. an official irc server would be an official extension of the board, so there's no real reason to be even more restrictive and invasive than on the forums.
None taken but pretty sure Id be invited

. If it thrived, where is it today though? I have no issues with impromptu or informal things like this but what Blue_Phlame says about monitoring the chat is exactly what I was getting at here. Its hard enough to keep up with violations here let alone a place where the chat is in real time.
the original one was shut down by the admins, despite it thriving. its a decision they forced on everyone else. the first unofficial #bluelight channel, on undernet, thrived for many years, but eventually atrophied away and died because the regulars were extremely hostile to new people; after a few years and with no real way to pick up new users, it slowly withered away to nothing. another #bluelight channel was started on another irc server and it too thrived for years, but fell to the same thing, hostility to newbies and no real way to reach out and pick up new users. if you build it, people will come, especially if its an official chat server, with a webchat page here on bluelight to put users directly into it, like we had in the old days.