So Star Wars: Commander was a front for FF comms.

The chatroom would be disabled during FF events because then regular unsuspecting players couldn't see the comms going on and/or increase the difficulty of finding out the suspicious dates of which the chatroom lags. Too bad, because it was caught. There's multiple ways of doing this but I'm assuming these guys were whitelisted or given a special role to bypass the chat having been disabled to the regular player accounts.