From Staff Chat Rooms - Instructions

[FollowingHim]

This post explains how to use the chat rooms feature as currently configured.

You must have a forum account and be logged in to view or use the chat rooms.

Click the word "Chat" at the top of the page to enter the chat rooms. You will be able to see the "General Chat" room, and watch any conversations happening in it. If you comment, you will be considered "in" the chat, and your username will appear on the right. To leave, either move the mouse to your name and click "leave room" in the dropdown menu, type "/quit" in the chat box, or just don't comment for 30 minutes. For more features type "/help" in the chat box.

This general chat room is visible to anyone logged in to the website. For more private chat, join or add a "chat room".

Beside the words "General Chat" will be a tab labelled "+". This will display rooms you can enter. You may also make a new chatroom by clicking "Add Room". Rooms may be password-protected if needed.

When a new person joins a room, they are immediately listed as a chat participant. All people in the room will be able to see that they are there. The new person will be able to see the last 5 posts in the chat, but nothing before that.

If the new person should not be in the chat room, the person who made the room, or a moderator, may eject them from the room by typing "/kick username" (with no quotes, where username is the username of the person to be kicked out of the room). The person will be unable to enter the room for two hours.

If you have a reason to be particularly careful about privacy, remember that a person's name will disappear after 30 minutes of inactivity, as the software assumes they have left. But it is possible for someone to keep the window open for >30 minutes without commenting, have their name disappear, but keep watching the conversation. If a chat room has been disused for more than half an hour, don't assume it is empty. If you have an extremely private matter to discuss, start a new chat room rather than using an existing one, or use a password-protected room you control, just in case. Archives are stored of conversations (I have tried to disable this feature but have not been able to), but posts are automatically deleted from the archive after 1 day, are only viewable by moderators (who do not actually view them), and the moderators can also erase the entire archive instantly on request without looking at it.

Please delete chat rooms you have made when you are finished with them, to keep this tidy. Chat rooms may also disappear after a day of being unused, and moderators may occasionally delete rooms to keep it tidy, don't panic if your room disappears as you can always make another one. To delete rooms, click "+" again, and click the red X beside your room you wish to delete.

Monday night ladies chat should occur in a room entitled "ladies" or "ladies chat", freshly created at the start of the evening to ensure there can be no lurkers eavesdropping, that is open for anybody to enter (ie no password required).

Discussion on the chat configuration should occur here. Comments on that thread may be out of date and not relate to the current configuration of the chat feature.
Information on the weekly ladies chat may be found here.

 

[FollowingHim]

Additional features of the chat room:
Look at the "Settings" menu when in the chat. There you may:

• Choose a unique colour for your comments
• Enable desktop notifications

Type /help within the chat to find out additional things you may do.

 

[FollowingHim]

New chat room features, following a forum update (thankyou @nathan):

• You can "like" people's messages
• There is a big red "leave room" button (very handy)
• You can now roll dice. I have no idea why you'd want to. But if you type "/roll" you'll roll one six-sided die, and if you type "/roll 3d12" you'll roll three 12-sided dice. Completely pointless, but there you go!

And the big one: PRIVATE CHAT

The below explanation has the potential to be confusing, since this is yet another way you can talk to people on a site that already offers you many different ways to talk to people. If you don't want to be confused, just ignore this entire feature and forget it exists, carry on doing what you're already doing. You DON'T need to understand this to use the forum. It is a tiny little new detail that may be of use to someone, but that someone is not necessarily you.

Also, this has a very high risk of being abused by scammers. The last thing I want is for people to be able to sign up to the forum and immediately start soliciting people via the chat. This is not a dating service, we first and foremost aim to protect people. However, at the same time, this feature could be very useful for genuine forum users, so I wanted to make it available. The settings here are to strike a balance between providing this service to genuine users while minimising the risk of abuse. They're not exactly what I'd like, but they're the best I've been able to do.

When you first sign up to the website, private chat is not available. Once the site thinks you're probably a real genuine person as per this explanation (or a moderator has manually confirmed you are), as well as being granted the ability to send private messages, you will also be able to use private chat. If you can edit your forum posts, you're an approved user. To the top right of the chat box you will see the words "Private Conversations", click here to start a private chat with someone. You can only have a private chat with someone else who is also an active user of the website, if you try starting a chat with a new user who has not yet been approved then they will be unable to reply, and you or they may get some odd error messages.

Private chat is truly private. There is no archive of the messages, moderators cannot see what you have discussed. And once both people "leave" the chat, the conversation is entirely deleted (if only one person "leaves", the messages are retained and reappear when you start talking to the same person again).

I apologise for the confusing terminology as the features of this forum grow. For clarity, this website has two ways to talk to people in private, both very confusingly labelled "private conversations" by the forum software.

1. Private messages = Writing someone a letter you can both keep and refer to
   To the top right of the page you will see the word "Inbox". In here, you may send and receive longer messages - think letters, email, normal forum posts. You may start a conversation with one or more individuals. Use this to write someone a detailed letter. These messages will be saved until you delete them.
   New users: Can receive new messages, and talk to anyone who has started a conversation with them.
   Approved users: Can start new conversations with anyone.
   IF IN DOUBT, THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO TALK TO ANYBODY IN PRIVATE
   .
2. Chat = Talking to someone in real-time, keeping no record of what you discussed
   At the middle top of the page you will see the word "Chat". This is an additional feature for live, real-time back and forth of short messages with people who happen to be online at the same time as you. This is where the weekly ladies chat occurs. And now you can have a truly private, live chat with a single individual. These messages are not saved, they will generally disappear within a day, it is just for real-time conversations.
   New users: Can chat publicly in the general chat room, or can join a chat room such as for ladies chat to talk to multiple individuals. Cannot do any private chat at all.
   Approved users: Can start chat rooms (e.g. for ladies chat). Can also start private conversations with other approved users.

If this is confusing, just ignore it. You don't need to know about this, you don't need to use this feature, just keep doing what you've always done. But since the feature was available with a new update, I have made it available just in case it is useful for somebody.

If you have any questions or comments, please post those here.