chat room

A friend sent me a private chat message and I posted a reply, but the next message I tried to send created this error: "The server took too long to respond! : ( " and it's still happening.

I was looking at settings in the Chat room this morning and saw an option to create a room. I didn't actually create one, I was just looking at options, but I noticed there was a setting for a password... If I were to leave that field blank, does that mean that anyone logged in chat join the room?