A good chat room is like a good pub. When you walk in and there are 3 people asleep at the bar and the place is pretty much empty it doesn't really make you want to stay for an ale. My solution for the pub would be a Tuesday $7 steak night and Thursday ladies nights with 1/2 price drinks....

Open forum learning is great for base level tuts, but is unfortunately restricted by the lowest common denominator in the room which can frustrate more advanced participants. In attempting to drive traffic to the Rendo chat platform you appear to be going against the mass market entities such as Facebook and other direct chat access platforms, so you may have a tough job shifting traffic through these day. But best of luck I hope it works out for the best. Let me know when happy hour is and I will try to drop by :)