I've been having this issue too. Seems to have gotten worse in January/lately. It shows the same "Connecting to chat server" message on the Whisper tab every time I log in. Only the News tab works, sometimes. Game works fine, everything else is loaded though I haven't seen any of these new quests I have been hearing were coming. I do recall a message saying quests were temporaily turned off though.
Specs:
Firefox 9.0.1
Linux Ubuntu 11.10 with Xfce over top
NoScript Firefox Plugin V2.2.5
NoScript is currently allowing three sites to run scripts from
http://www.castleempireonline.com/en/play:
1. castleempireonline.com
2. ubi.com
3. google-analytics.com
Is the chat service running through a different site? Hmm...
According to the page source the above three sites are referred to, as well as:
1. diesiedleronline.de and 2. 50.56.15.108:80
The former appears to be a backup site (?) and the latter seems to be chat related...
This process resolved it for me. Looks like a NoScript issue.
1. Logout of CastleEmpireOnline
2. Go to NoScript options and added the five domains above to the whitelist.
3. Go into Firefox preferences and clear the cache.
4. May or may not be needed but I ended up restarting my computer for a different reason and when it booted back up (firefox restarted) all five tabs were working on next login.
May only be a valid fix for users with NoScript plugins.