Today we have introduced restricted access to chat in that you MUST have been a member for more than 5 days and done a post on the forum before being allowed in chat.
This will be increasing to 30 days in the next couple of days but was put in as an emergency action tonight following some recent problems in chat.
This, we hope, is a positive step forward and is in no way intended to prevent people getting into chat when they need instant help. We are merely hoping to stop people who are creating logins just to go in and disrupt chat for genuine users.
We will monitor this closely to see if it helps prevent some of the problems we get in chat with new members.