Hm. I know Southperry has a 
pJIRC applet page, for the people who don’t use IRC and are too lazy to set up their client and whatnot. It could be put in place of the current Chat thing, the only disadvantage being perhaps taking a bit longer to load Java and connect to the server and whatnot. I don’t know anything about setting it up though, only using it (which is very simple; go to the page, wait for the applet to load, and you’re in).