comment-VirtualChatRooms-2 VirtualChatRooms

The main issue I have is that you cannot see who is logged in unless you are also logged in.

If you want to have a list in SnipSnap of who is logged in to a certain channel there are several solutions to do so, one method may be to make an irc bot to store the online list to a file which can be read by lets say somthing like this macro {online-list:channel}

A simple irc bot as this can be made using the PircBot java irc framework. I have also made a simple bot in Qexo using this framework. See: http://localhost:8181/space/PircBot

So you would be looking at a page and have to log in to see if there is anyone to chat with and their might not be.

But if everybody thinks like you, there would never be someone in a channel ;)

Using IRC is a good approach too, although I still think you need some way of looking up the IRC server to connect to, unless there is something in IRC-land for scaling.

I'm not certain what you mean by this. When using the PJIRC applet you can specify which server to connect to and also alternative servers if it can't connect.