You entered a tickling chat room, and object to people opening a private conversation by talking about tickling. This may not be entirely reasonable.
If I enter a Heinlein chat room, and somebody opens a private conversation asking about whether Lazarus Long should have been allowed to suicide at the beginning of Time Enough for Love, or whether Luna could have supported more of a welfare state in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I certainly wouldn't be offended . . . even though those are two of his most popular books, and maybe I'm more interested in paternalism in Farnham's Freehold or comparisons between the roles of mothers in Podkayne of Mars and PL Travers' Mary Poppins.
If they open a conversation with something like, "Can we chat?" however, I am a bit leery: they are asking me to commit to an interaction without proving that they have anything to say or even addressing a topic of presumed common interest.
This is why people in realspace make small talk about the weather, television, or current events: they're appealing to a common experience or knowledge base. In a tickling chat room, "What tickles you most" is no more out of place than "Which novel did you like best?" in the hypothetical Heinlein chat room, and markedly superior to "What's your sign?" at a bar.
Sure, the examples you gave are a little lame, and maybe, "What do you like about tickling?" would give an appearance of less predatory behaviour, but the fact remains that initiating a conversation by appealing to an apparent common interest is a reasonable gambit in interpersonal interactions.
On TMF? What's in a name is exactly what the user put there. It's how you present yourself to the world at large. My username on TMF, for instance, is almost a warning label of sorts.
🙂 (Of course, even with that warning, my current partner has been dismayed when I react fearfully to innocuous stimuli, but at least this way I know he -was- warned.
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here...
either way, well said hun LOVE YOU!!! 
