I have also been noticing this and have much the same thoughts as you do. It really hit me over the last couple of days, when I found out about a significant event in the lives of two longterm regulars, not through the forum, but through a livejournal post which most Rinkies would not even see unless somebody else told them about it. With all due respect to the people involved, that stung.

I can only give my opinion on closing RinkChat as it applies to me personally, so here it is. I still go into Rinkchat every day, hoping against hope to see one or more of my best friends there. Usually they aren't there, so I leave again. If they're on AIM, I'll talk to them on AIM. But it isn't the same. To me, AIM is for talking about specific things one-on-one, and does not give me the same pleasure as being able to hang out in chat with three or four of my nearest and dearest.

If Rinkchat closed, my first reaction would be to email those people and see if there was some other chatroom somewhere, anywhere, where we could arrange to hang out instead. My second reaction would come about two seconds after the first, and would be "Why bother? If none of them are ever in THIS room, they won't be in any other room either." My third reaction would be to sink into a morass of gloom and despondency, metaphorically throw up my arms and declare the glory days to be over, and go back to miserably talking to people one at a time on AIM.

I find a similar thing happening with my view of the forum. If something very significant or special happens in my life, my first instinct is to post it on the forum so all my friends will know about it. But then I wonder why I should bother, when almost everybody I know has trickled away to various livejournals. Significant events in my life are still not quite so significant that I want to post about them here if the only people who will read it are a bunch of kids who have known of my existence for maybe two months and have never had as much as one in-depth conversation with me. At the same time, I *want* to tell my friends about what's going on in my life, like I used to in the old days -- but there really isn't any way I can do that online, in the context of a group conversation, when none of them hang out here anymore.

A couple of months ago I stated my intention to start using my real name in chat, because I've known my friends here for years and it's just stupid that I don't use the name they call me when we meet in person. I meant this at the time, but it hasn't happened. And the only important reason for that is the amount of times I've BEEN in chat and realised the room contained, out of 18 people, maybe one person I actually knew well enough to care what they called me. So, again, why bother? Who cares if I call myself Carrie or Brunnen-G or Wolfenstein or Michael Jackson or Princess Beulizah Hopkins-DeRangement the Fourth or any other stupid name I can think of? They don't KNOW me.

I don't have any answers to this problem. I will keep trying to maintain the friendships that are special to me, with chat or without it. I will keep trying to use this forum and chatroom the same way I have for years. That's my rational and balanced reply to your post. My irrational, whiny and probably-to-be-regretted reply is that I wish people would damn well start reciprocating.