I miss it too! Don’t worry, Pete knows what it means to Tea Traders – although it’s nice you mentioned it. The current chat “system” was measurably slowing down the loading of the site, so Pete temporarily took it off. He has plans to go with a different “provider” which won’t affect performance like this. The chat function is a separate component. I have no idea if I’m using the right terms. Anyway, you get my gist.
Unfortunately right now he has a ton of things he needs to do with Tea Trade, there are a bunch of upgrades that must be done, so the chat function isn’t top of the list. Well, just keep mentioning it in updates…and hopefully we’ll get it back up very soon!

Noted. I hear you @lahikmajoe – !!

I go back and forth with our current chat service. We pay a lot of money to use it and access it, and it is a good service in terms of features; but, it is damn slow. It actually doubles the load time of the entire Tea Trade main site. Last week when I was timing things down to the millisecond – I was getting frustrated that it was actually adding 5-6 seconds onto the load time. That’s an eternity to wait for a webpage. Because it is an outside service, it relies on a lot of outside resources not hosted on our server – that’s a lot of things that I can’t control. Last week I was about ready to send some hate mail to the developer…

Unfortunately, even though it is slow, the alternatives for it don’t offer the same level of features. Anyhow, since you asked so nicely and I know that it makes for a convenient place to chat, it is turned back on. Guess, I have to send that mean letter to the dev after all…!