Could the shoutbox be considered a chat room?

Do you think that the shoutbox can be considered a Movie Forums chat room?

In my opinion: Yes.

No, we have a chat room only it gets rolled out for special occasions like Oscar night. There's a thread about it and a transcript if you're interested. It's probably one page back in this sub-forum.

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You can obviously use it as a chatroom, but everybody will see everything you say for posterity, and you won't know when anybody is preparing a response. Most chatrooms only display what's been said from the time you're logged on until you're logged off, and even then, you'll miss something if you're too long away from the screen because it can only hold so much info (although that depends on the software). I believe the Oscar chat was available to everyone for its entirety.

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