I've been a member of an online community that's mostly aimed at kids - although we've got members aged 8 to in their 20s - for almost four years now. There's a live chat available (with some pretty aggressive word filters). Now, I don't drop in very regularly - I drop in around one every couple weeks, usually. I used to be much more active on the forums, but most of the people I know there I know from like 2 years ago (of those who are still around) - I don't know the younger generation very well.
Now, when I drop into the livechat, I'll often just talk to the few people that I know... ignoring the rest of the people. Now, most of the time the other people in the chat aren't actually interested in chatting; they're more interested in role-playing. But I'm more interested in chatting with the people I know, like discussing one girl's YouTube channel and stuff like that. So I'll often just put everybody else on ignore (because it can be hard to keep track of a conversation when you've got a stream of unrelated messages).
What I'm wondering is: Is this rude to the other users of the room? If they try to talk to me I won't even notice, because I have them on ignore... and this could be 'clique'ish, because it's basically just two or three users who've known each other for a couple years ignoring all the newer people. (This is... at least a year and a half after the oldies vs. newbies war that left the site in ruins and with a severely depleted population, but I really don't want to cause it to resurface.)
Is it acceptable to ignore everyone else in the room and talk to only specific people?