Right now - there is no realtime chat support but we are going to add it soon. The rationale behind going for the message board style first was that the market already has too many chat platforms at the moment and though the communities on chat platforms are great the context gets lost pretty soon when there are too many members. This also leads to reduced quality of discourse.

There is a use-case for real-time chat as you mentioned though. For eg. a community of baseball fans will need a real-time chat during an ongoing game and they shouldn't need to switch platforms for that.

Ready to use realtime chat room here :

https://github.com/altilunium/darkhallv3

Yep - kind of, but in a cleaner way. I love forums too.

Also, the intent is to be a platform to support communities for small-businesses since most of them do not use communities for their benefit in the same way as big corporations do it.