I actually configured Dynmap in that way.

“I may be in a unique situation, however, I find myself wishing that I could use the chat feature from IP addresses that I don’t play minecraft”
Then how do we verify who they are? We’d have to start maintaining an IP ban list which is inaccurate for the same reasons.

“I have also noticed on occasion that the current chat feature misidentifies people as it is based on the last person who logged in from a particular IP address.”
I’m pretty sure they can solve this by just putting their MC name in the URL. (eg. http://mc.finalscoremc.com:25966/?chatname=PseudoKnight) I haven’t tested it with multiple usernames, though.

“It also seems that persons who are banned from the server can continue to chat with the server unimpeded via the live map.”
I actually manually remove their IP from their name, but there’s other ways of doing this. Once I move bans over to my own system, it’ll apply to dynmap chat too. Another thing to consider (for this and other needs) is I can require a permission node to use webchat.

I don’t know if I want to run an IRC server too, but I do like the small clients. Loading up the whole map just to chat is sort of silly. Then again, I don’t know if we should really use MC chat for non-MC chat. Maybe that’s where mumble comes in. I will look at that plugin again to see if offers some other useful functionality, though.

What are other people’s thoughts?