When I try to talk to my friends who are online, it says that everyone offline, even though when I go to their profile page, it says that they are currently online! This has become a problem because I am trying to have quick contact with some thread owners, and I can't talk to them. On top of that, whenever I try to open a chat with one of my friends, the entire page freezes and I can't reload the page. So I just have to X out the tab, then wait for a few minutes before reopening the game.

Profiles is just an official tracker of, "Has this player loaded a page within x amount of time", basically.

Comet Chat (the instant messaging bar at the bottom), uses its own online/offline system and a player can even mark themselves as invisible or offline - even if they actually are on the site at the time.

As for the technical issues you are having, I would suggest making sure that your browser is fully up to date as well as making sure that you are not using any addons or extensions that might be tampering with the page. I believe there is also an issue where zooming in or zooming out of the page messes with Comet Chat's functionality - it basically only works correctly at 100% zoom. So that could be an issue as well.

Thank, for the advice! (: