Shoutbox... .sigh.... traffic on the site has gone up in the forums. Goal was met. But we are discussion options.
Traffic on the forums may have gone up, but it's still a freakin ghost town in there sometimes. Not that that's your fault--I just don't get why there are complaints about a lack of a shoutbox, while the off-topic threads in the lounge get only a couple of posts a day.
I mean, is the inconvenience of having to refresh the forum every few minutes really that bad that people would rather just not post at all, unless it's really important?
I'm playing devil's advocate here... but if I was a site admin, I could have a hard time being convinced of the need for a real-time off-topic chat, when the off-topic section of the forum is barely used. If the only section of the forum being used was the random chat thread, it'd be a different story... but that thread only gets posted in a few times a week. Seems to me that if a chat feature was really that important to people, that thread/section would be getting a bit more use.
In other words, actions speak louder than words. Convince the admins that we really need a dedicated off-topic chat feature, and you'll probably have a better chance of getting the shoutbox back. My $0.02