The website chat is pretty well nailed down now and it works well. It'd be nice if factions could have their own channels, as out-of-game chat is nice but there are not many good options other than IRC, and that's not exactly great.
What I propose is a system tied into global factions. On the chat page there would be an option to switch to your faction's channel, which would be moderated by faction leaders instead of Starmade Dock staff.
I thought I might as well reply to this
I just don't foresee any large demand for something like this, as you mentioned, there are alternative options available. These would actually be far better than anything we could offer.
As you mentioned there is IRC, there is also
TeamSpeak (which I know a few factions here use),
Discord (Voice and text chat),
Slack (text chat),
Google Hangouts,
Hipchat and more.
I've personally used all of the chat solutions mentioned above, and all of them are definitely better than anything that we could offer (plus they all are either free or have free plans).
For pure voice chat I would recommend TeamSpeak, it's fairly universal in the gaming community, easy to use and easy to setup.
For pure text chat, I would suggest using Slack or IRC depending on your needs. Slack offers a free plan with all the features you'd ever need for text communication.
Mixing voice and text together in one app is what Discord offers, it's fairly new... but definitely well worth checking out.
