Daniel M. Ingram:
It is totally buggy: I agree.
The problem is that, despite lots of people trying, nobody has managed to upgrade this place from an earlier version of LifeRay (the platform this thing runs on) to a newer version.
Thus, for the moment, we are stuck with this one.
Use it at your peril: switch rapidly to Skype or Gmail Chat or something else, and realize that lots of people who appear to be online may not actually be there at that time, so if you don't hear from them, don't take it personally.
D
What I found worked well recently is to use
Chatzy to create a room, then to share the address with the person I was chatting with. Nice that it doesn't require both people to already have Skype or Gmail or something.