Chat won't let me instant message, display profile, or use HELP button

When I'm in chat I can't instant message (IM button does nothing), display profile button does nothing, and the Help button doeas nothing. Are my IE settings wrong? How do I fix it. Also it seems no one can IM me privately. Please let me know how to fix it. thanks

those features have been broken for many many years.

Most of what you're going to read in this post is speculation.

The chat room on SG is provided for us by the folks at userplane, a company that provides advertising to websites. Many of which are flash applets, little tiny flash programs. Common amongst advertising companies is to buy packages of ads from other companies. Who, in turn, have bought ads from other companies. After so many levels of third party advertising companies, quality control gets to be a bit of an issue. Hell, any control gets to be an issue. As a result, some less-than-ideal ads will slip through. One or two of which happen to be for a spyware program (which went away for a while but has recently resurfaced, so don't install anything if a popup comes up saying you need to install some anti-malware program). When that ad comes up, it'll produce a pupup window.

I suspect that, since SG doesn't have control over which ads get displayed, they did the only thing they do have control over. Which is either A) pay for the non-ad version which most likely isn't in SGs budget, B) discontinue the chat room entirely, which if people don't wanna use it they don't have to click on the link to join it, so anyone who uses the chat room accepts these minor inconveniences, or C) disable any popups from coming up. Which, somewhat unfortunately means making it so that the popup windows that would contain an IM or the person's profile won't pop up.

I say somewhat unfortunately because while it's kindo a bugger to not have the profile button or help button work, those are rather minor inconveniences, if you ask me. The IM feature was a fuckin' pain in the ass for most people who used the chat room when it worked. The models would be trying to have a great conversation with their favorite members/models, and every 30 seconds some jackass would send them an IM trying to flirt/cam/hook up/ask them to do a backflip/etc. SG does have a help staff who will answer help requests so, while the actual button in the chat room doesn't work, there's always the help request feature on SG. The profile button not working is a bummer, but quite a very minor bummer since you can always just type in the person's name into the URL bar.