I’ve spent a lot of time at IGN.com’s forums. They have boards dedicated to particular games. As time passes, regular posters begin to form relationships with each other. In order to keep the boards informative as well as personable, someone almost invariably creates a thread known as, for example, The Official Halo 3 Community Thread. This allows anyone to talk about anything within that thread, kind of like a chat room. I see that Mises has a chat room, but it’s desolate.
How about creating a community board? Many times I’ll have thoughts I’d like to discuss but I don’t want to inundate the forums with my jibberish. Community threads/boards are very useful and can allow nebulous ideas to take form and can lead to the development of non-community threads. It could also encourage more participation from lurkers, who might be apprehensive for whatever reason.