By 7:30 PM or so EST, there are usually a few people in the room. I was there last night off and on until past midnight. I’ll probably be back there again tonight.
I need some help here. I have accessed the Straight Dope Chat through the hyperlink provided, but on the chat screen I only see the commands “Disconnect” and “Configure,” but no command “Send.” OK, maybe I’m doing this at the wrong time of day or week–but shouldn’t there be more commands on that screen? If I hit Enter my message disappears.
November 20th, 2 pm, PST; I tried logging on again, nothing happened again. 
Regarding the IRC:
This past week, I had occasion to converse via e-mail with a chat operator regarding “banned from this channel.” As it turns out, I wasn’t banned; however, another AOL member in my area did something offensive and got banned.
Since AOL doesn’t issue fixed IP addresses for the screen-names, the banning on IRC has to be area-specific.
So basically that means any worthless asshole in your area using an AOL account and doing something incredibly stupid in an IRC channel will get a lot of folks banned.
There is a fix in place though. If you’re not the worthless asshole concerend, you have to /msg a sysop for the channel concerned and then request you be allowed in.
A better fix would be for AOL to issue fixed IP addresses.
Does it help if you dial in to AOL using a different access phone line?
The best thing, Monty, would be to get a real ISP that handles things differently…
Yer pal,
Satan