What can we do to (and should we) bring back Fluther's chat rooms?

Well, it’s official. The chat rooms are more dead than ever. I’ve been in the room a lot recently, which is enough to gather some stats:

The average number of other people that enter the chat room in one day (not at the same time) is around four.
The number of times that I chat each day, even by staying in the room for as long as I can: 1 time.
Most people that enter the room are there for less than one minute, and idle out.
Likewise, most people in the room do not say anything.

So, the chats rooms are empty. Big surprise.

In my opinion, this is the make-or-break time for the Fluther chat rooms. We can either make a community effort to increase the usage of the chat room (instead of chatting in Social threads), or we can ditch the idea of trying to bring back the chat rooms.

I’m fully for the first option. I believe that the chat rooms are the appropriate place for us to do many of the things that we do in Social, such as “the Great Fluther War,” which is currently in the same category as opinionated, but otherwise serious questions.

However, there are some difficulties. Programming changes won’t happen. Also, we need community effort: nobody will enter a chat room if it is already empty, but by being in the chat room, more people will join.

I particular, this will need the mod’s support. Everyone saw how much happened because of the t-shirt contest. The mods have a lot of power in the community. Mods, what do you think?

In light of the difficulties, I suppose this is also prime time to ditch the chat rooms and forget about this issue once and for all.