Chat Maintenance

Chat will be down tonight around 11pm EST / 4am GMT for maintenance and updating. Hopefully this will not be for more than an hour.

Please bear with us - these changes should hopefully improve the chat experience for everyone. Thank you for your patience.

its looking good thankyou for all your hard work and thankyou ben too

Thanks for you hard work, Freya and everyone else involved in bringing it back up. Before the maintenance, the chat seemed to be very slow for me logging in (sometimes having to wait 1 minute or more) before I could actually get in the chat, not to mention problems with seeing who is online to talk in the chat, so here is hoping the maintenance has fixed this issue, or at least cut down the lag significantly to be able to use it.

If I can ask, with the maintenance, I did not really notice any real changes since it came back on-line... Is there anything new about the chat system, or just reset it to act as the old chat?

The biggest change is the size of the chat box and the text in the chat room - it is larger now so people with eyesight issues no longer have a problem, plus the user name now shows in blue above the message rather than very pale grey.

The other major change is animated emotes. Most of the 'old' triggers work with some minor changes (e.g. what was before is now 1 because we have 2 3 etc also)

With massive massive thanks to @Tim the Emote Emperor for his hard work on chat - could not have done it without him!

I do not understand what you mean by logging into chat- there is no chat log in unless you are manually turning it off, because the chat is on as soon as you log into your account.

Chat list was set at 60 seconds refresh, that has been cut down, but the reason to leave it and cut it down are fairly equal. By having longer, people that click on a room to see who is there then leave do not show up in room, and is not wasted of 6 people saying hello when they left as soon as they looked just trying to see who was in which room. I changed it to a 20 second refresh on the chat list. Setting it faster uses greater server resources bouncing back and forth to server with just a packet of who is in the chat room that actually does not change a lot from second to second.

Accessing chat delays from a mobile device are almost certainly an issue with the mobile carrier/connection and any mobile device is going to have chats performance based on the connection speed of the device as much as the chat here. I would recommend turning off names , sounds, etc if you are experiencing delays form mobile to reduce the amount of information trying to move and data speed will be largely dependent on provider/location.

The changes were made and to most are very clear (far less so on the mobile side of chat) The chat room is now much larger (about 4x the surface area) so that you can s see more then one line of previous chat, the names of chatters are easier to see, and all of chat is in a larger easier to read font. The message heartbeat/refresh rate was cut by 1/3 so that the messages refresh and appear faster, and the chat list updates at 3x the speed it did before.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference to many is the fact that there are now real emoticons again, having resurrected nearly all from the old chat room, plus a few more. Some are not functioning quite yet, but with 400 or so to choose from most will manage to find something to get the point across. The emotes take time to propagate to everybody. Some can see all now , some can see few or none. Within 24 hours all will be on the same. Until then, some emotes will look funny or not show for some individuals.

Oh, so the emoticons have changed? No wonder whenever I tried to use the hug emoticon yesterday, it did not work, like it use to.
So for hugs, instead of the old code you put in, you just put in 1, 2 and 3?

Yes. The "normal" hug is 1 now. The reason the hugs didn't work yesterday is because the emote changes were only implemented a few hours ago - with huge thanks to Ben and especially Tim for making the animated emotes work.

Thanks for letting all us know, Freya and thanks again to Ben and also . Tim. Glad that some emoticons are starting to get put back up on the site and things, since the site transfer are finally coming back on-line, like in the old days.

I am assuming for now that with the emoticons, only the basic ones are being added for the time being, with more to be added later down the line, like to 80+ or so emoticons that were available in the beginning?

Ben - what I meant by that is that whenever I load that, half the time,whenever I tried to enter the Main Room, it would freeze for about a minute or less before granting me access to go into the chat, or else it would not load the chat at all, that I could not see even the main Room or the Triggering Subjects, but that does not seem to be a problem now, so thanks a lot to yourself and to .Tim for working hard on taking it down for maintenance earlier in the day and working on it.

I do not access the chat at all on my iPad (I have no other mobile device to use), which is why, when you or anyone sees me online and see that I am not the Chat, it means i am using my ipad, because the Chat does not work on my iPad (but not surprising, since my iPad is a 1st generation iPad so the OS or whatever it is that you call it on those tings probably cannot recognise the newer codes used on most website Chat features on websites, because it is not longer compatible with thoday's technology upgrades).
But that does not worry me, not being able to use the Chat with my ipad, because half the log-in with my iPad just to just browse and use the forums (as well as reply). Only when I am on my PC, can i get into the Chat and spend most of my time there, while occasionally posting in the forums - but I mostly leave posting in the forums for when I am my iPad.