There are chatrooms out there, only they are becoming more scarce, and hard to find. MSN chat used to have several user created chat rooms before they went to a paid subscription (about $20.00 per year). There were usually 30 to 40 people in two or three Martial Art chat rooms every night. Now, you don't find any Martial Art rooms on MSN, and all of the chat rooms have dropped in participation. If you subscribe, you can still open and host your own user chat about Martial Art, but you would have to get the word out, and only those with paid subscription could participate
http://chat.msn.com/
The big thing there now, is the MSN communities
http://groups.msn.com/. You can do a search for Martial Art, and find several
http://groups.msn.com/browse.msnw?catid=327. It's free to join these (all you need is to create a free MSN Passport account), but each group will often require an application to join, and managers approval which takes a day or two, then they might not have a very active chat room.
Yahoo used to have some Martial Art chat, then their user create chat got cut off a while back. Now, I don't find any chat rooms open there, just a fAQ section that asks and answers the question "why are there no more chat rooms on Yahoo?" Answer: Yahoo messenger is more popular, and a higher priority for Yahoo's tech staff.
I like chat rooms, but you do get the trolls who screw things up, and a lot of Martial Art wannabes. If you know what you're talking about, there are those with little or no experience, who argue with you for no reason, and call you a "poser" or some such name. It's usually pimple faced teen computer geeks (no offense to anyone here), who host these chat rooms, and they are more into computer hacking and running scripts than the Martial Art. They'll ban you from chat just for politely pointing out the fact that they don't know the difference between a sensei and sushi (literally).
If we had a well run chat room here, I would participate in it!
CM D.J. Eisenhart
artyon: 
