Chat is a weird place in general, at times. It should be a place where everyone can meet and discuss any aspect of the show (or snow 🙂 ) they want, but it can get aggressive quickly.
What makes chat “strange” to me, is that it seems like sometimes people make grand assumptions there than in the threads – ex: If you’re CS you must hate Neal. However, if you pop in the CS thread, you quickly see that the vast majority of posters DON’T hate Neal – and have very nice things to say about him and others. I know I’ve asked people more than once to please take a look and see that it’s not an anti-Neal thread, it’s a pro-CS thread. And the same absolutely goes for the CF thread – I’ve seen many nice things about Hook said there as well; it’s not an anti-Hook thread, it’s a pro-CF thread! However in chat it seems to be a different story.
Or maybe it just seems like it gets aggressive in chat, because as others have said, sometimes people may merely be misunderstood when they’re not trying to be aggressive. I think sometimes just a little clarity – “are we all still good with the conversation?” might help. What aggravates me is that it’s RIGHT THERE. Sometimes I know I’m just not in the right mood to deal and just want to see my shippy goodness but you simply can’t avoid chat. I’m not good at all the web design stuff so I assume it’s a huge task to move it to it’s own page, though, so you can choose when you want to see it and when you don’t.