gazarsgo
I think a more useful chat would be used more, so you're kind of putting the cart before the horse here IMO. I would embed chat into the game world viewer such that it's always visible, and have a dropdown filter in place for chats, with options for viewing all/specific world / specific alliance.
I'm talking about more chat room features, like away settings, custom fonts, etc.
It sounds like you're saying it shouldn't be a chat room at all, but rather something integrated into the game. The issue there is that the game moves amongst several different top-level pages as you play, so an embedded chat would either clear or have to reload the conversation history when a new page is visited. That really wouldn't be an ideal setup.
I set it up as a pop-up so people could leave it open in a separate window as they play, eliminating the problems with an embedded chat (though it may be a bit less convenient).