yes but...

I wholly support the chat, so don't take this the wrong way, please. Chat is great for conversation and the interactivity of it make for good brainstorming and efficient problem solving. And PM's are great for private conversation. But the information is restricted to those involved at the time....

What's great about the forum is that it creates a legacy of information... a public library of sorts, a place where others can share in learning at their leisure, can search for long past topics, can see pictures attached many moons ago, etc. That's why we encourage newbies who are shy/afraid to ask what they believe will be embarrassing questions to post them anyway... because if one newbie has the question, likely many do.

We need to make sure we feed the information into both venues somehow.

just my $.02